Well, back home from Satellite 3. Overall it was a very enjoyable con, and informative too. The latter point is a surprise, and makes me realise that Satellite 3 had a very science-fact heavy makeup, which is not at all a bad thing. This fact alone makes it an particularly good con, because it's all very well to watch us writers pontificate about our influences and where the genre is going, but it's really much more valuable to get some genuine education.
I did feel that the second day was a little subdued compared to the the first. People I spoke to attributed this to the large amount of beer that had been consumed the night before.
On the second day I went to talks on 'The Chinese Space Program', 'Laser mapping for fun and profit' and 'Paths to the Planets', and panels on "Has Science Fiction Become Mainstream?" and "Has Science Ruined Science Fiction?"
I found the 'Chinese Space Program' talk informative, but a little propaganda-ish. I felt very sure that I should investigate some of the speaker's claims before accepting them on face value. There was a strong impression in the talk that all that matters is manned space-flight, going back to the moon, etc, etc, and I don't feel this is very realistic. With robot probes currently exploring the entire solar system from mercury to the outer reaches, I find it very questionable that we need to be doing manned spaceflight right now. The problems of long-term manned spaceflight and habitation remain serious, but may be solved by the coming biotech revolution (for instance, can we develop plant-life, fungi or algae that will grow in an airless environment, extracting all it needs from regolith or ice? That would really make things easier.) If we are in a 'gap period' when human spaceflight is on the back burner, that might not be a terrible thing, (so long as it doesn't become a permanent state of affairs). The claim, therefore, that the Chinese are 'Way ahead of everyone else' because they are putting people into space and planning on going to the moon, seemed very suspect to me. I also felt there was a strong whiff of anti-Americanism in some of the programmes, which combined with the (not unreasonable) admiration of the Chinese space program sometimes made some of the speakers sound like 'useful idiots' for Comintern.
Ed Buckley had been very funny on one panel, so I went to his talk 'Paths to the Planets'. I have to say I was a little disappointed in this one, as I felt it was light on any actual information about getting to the planets.
I enjoyed the 'Laser mapping' talk which basically took us through the uses of lidar as a scanning/mapping tool, linked to 3d-printing to produce accurate copies of things, or used in archaeology to unconver hidden detail of objects. It gradually moved up through the scale of things until we were discussing the mapping of entire planets, but the scanning of Earthly archological finds, from tiny figurines to the huge earthworks at avebury, was probably the most interesting stuff.
Sunday's highpoint was probably the 'science guest' Jon Davis. He seemed a little nervous because, as he said "I normally perform for children." Indeed, I did wonder myself how his show would go down with a room-full of scientifically literate people, most of whom were in mid-to-late middle age. Turns out we needn't have worried. He started with the most everyday and boring thing imaginable, speaking under the influence of helium, and the second he did it everyone fell about laughing. Some things, it seems, just never get old. He then used another gas to achieve the opposite effect, lowering the sound of his voice (which I hadn't seen done before) and I learned that the cause of these effects was related to the speed of sound in different gasses (which I'd not previously known). He went on to produce clouds by mixing hot water and dry ice, and weighed his head using Archemedies' method (although he assumed the density of his head was close to that of water, which i did wonder about). All in all he was great entertainment for all ages, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one to learn something too.
All in all this was really a very good con, not the biggest I admit, but I'd recommend it nontheless. These people are bidding for Eastercon 2014. I'm sure some people will complain that Scotland is 'too far away', but I hope they get it, I think they'd do a good job.
Friday, 2 March 2012
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
I'm up at Electric Spec
My story "Love in a time of Bio-mal" is up at Electric Spec. Wow, these people are FAST, I sent this story to them on the 11th of Jan. They've gone from submission to publication in the timespan that some markets take just to respond to a submission.
I think they may have picked the story because it fits into their 'Post valentines' feel for the issue, and this theme still fits to the date as Feb 29th is traditionally the only day that women are allowed to propose marriage (A ridiculous hang-over from the past. Ladies (or anyone) if you want something in this life, pitch for it. Don't wait for others to give you permission, or the moment will be gone).
Anyways, thanks to all at Electric Spec for their hard work on my story (unlike many markets they actually did editing, and they did it within such a tight time-frame!) and for getting it out there so quickly.
Monday, 27 February 2012
Upcoming Stuff
Right, I should do more shameless promotion, as fellow monster Dwayne "doing science on paradise islands so YOU don't have to" Minton has set an example for the rest of us. So, here's some upcoming news.
Electric Spec are going to be publishing my 'Lurkerverse' story "Love in a Time of Bio-Mal" on Feb 29th. I'm startled at how quickly they've turned this around, acceptance to publication in ONE MONTH. Most people take a year and have rather more sturm und drang. Electric spec make things look easy. This is surely the quickest acceptance-to-publication timescale I've ever experienced.
The Dead Robots Society have announced the list of people in their upcoming "Explorers" anthology. I'm one of them. This is an anthology about "People changed by the discovery of new lands".
I should be doing readings at Eastercon and Alt Fiction of my story "The Taking of IOSA 2038" for the launch of Ian Sales' "Rocket Science". I'm daunted by this, especially after seeing readings done so terribly well in Glasgow, but sometimes a writer's gotta do what a writer's gotta do.
Electric Spec are going to be publishing my 'Lurkerverse' story "Love in a Time of Bio-Mal" on Feb 29th. I'm startled at how quickly they've turned this around, acceptance to publication in ONE MONTH. Most people take a year and have rather more sturm und drang. Electric spec make things look easy. This is surely the quickest acceptance-to-publication timescale I've ever experienced.
The Dead Robots Society have announced the list of people in their upcoming "Explorers" anthology. I'm one of them. This is an anthology about "People changed by the discovery of new lands".
I should be doing readings at Eastercon and Alt Fiction of my story "The Taking of IOSA 2038" for the launch of Ian Sales' "Rocket Science". I'm daunted by this, especially after seeing readings done so terribly well in Glasgow, but sometimes a writer's gotta do what a writer's gotta do.
Sunday, 26 February 2012
I'm at Satellite 3
So, I'm in Glasgow for Satellite 3. This is another small sci-fi con, and as I didn't really enjoy Novacon that much, I was thinking of giving it a miss. Maybe I'm not really the con-going type. However, the satellite 3 crowd seemed a really friendly bunch when I met them at Eastercon and Novacon, I'm in desperate need of something to fire up the old ideas fountain, I could always just go and explore Glasgow if it's crap, and I could think of nothing better to do with my birthday, so I went.
First, let's get Glasgow out of the way. It's not a great city to visit. Unlike Edinburgh, which is twisty and full of interesting crannies to explore, Glasgow is built on something more like a grid-layout, and the architecture is not human-friendly. Everything is impressive, but foreboding, and the city center mostly seems to be one giant open-air shopping mall full of 'big brand' shops that you can find anywhere. Most of the museums and art galleries and the aquarium etc, etc, appear to be situated far outside of the main city center (unless I'm reading the maps wrong). This is not a good city for the daytime visitor, I feel. Night-time is, perhaps, different, as the city abounds with pubs and eateries of all types, and judging by the Saturday night crowds it's a good place to party. There's no denying it, Glasgow really is Scotland's Birmingham, the two cities are very similar, and speaking as a Brummie myself, this is not something that entirely recommends it to the visitor.
Now onto the con. Satellite 3 is, I'm pleased to say, a much better con than Novacon. For a start there are two streams of programming, making it far less likely that you'll find yourself at a loose end with nothing that appeals. The first programme item, a talk on 'Advanced space concepts' fulfilled my 'professional' reason to attend the con, giving me a story idea, and one that I could join to a title that I've been wanting to use for some time, but couldn't think of a story to fit. In the break between items I consumed the first beer of the day, unwisely because I'd had no breakfast and I'm normally close to tea-total for months on end. My visual range immediately halved (I'm not happy about these 'laser fixed' eyes to be honest) and I was ready for the panel on 'Has Science Ruined Science Fiction,' which allowed me plenty of opportunity to shout opinions drunkenly from the audience (this is swiftly becoming my favorite thing to do at cons. (I note I am in good company in this regard)).
However, in the middle of the day I was facing a gap in the programme. I decided to fill it by doing the thing that one is always encouraged to do at cons 'join in' and 'help out'. I went to 'ops' to offer my services as a gopher. But ops was not the bustling, vibrant nerve center I expected it to be, more resembling a 'chill out room' than 'mission control'. They didn't need a gopher, so they made me 'ops manager' and then everyone disappeared. This struck me as being akin to going for a job as janitor at government headquarters, and being instantly made president while all the cabinet members slip away. I was wondering when the revolutionary mob were going to turn up demanding to be handed the president for public lynching. Fortunately, my term of office passed uneventfully, and earned me a pint, which was the most I've been paid yet for sitting around chatting to people.
Next I went to Phill Welling's "Inadvisable Rocket Science" talk about the crazy things that people used to do with chemical and nuclear explosives in WWII and the cold war, before 'health and safety' was invented. Alas, it didn't give me any stealable story ideas, but it was plenty enjoyable.
Then I went hunting food, not easy on a Saturday night in Glasgow where every eatery seems to be fully booked. Still, I found something and got back in time for 'Wordsmiths - readings by local writers'. I wanted to attend this panel because I'm going to have to do my first ever reading at Eastercon for my entry in Ian Sale's Rocket Science, and I wanted to see how it's done and what I'm up against. In retrospect this might not have been such a good idea.
Holey Shit. Look, you have to understand, I don't like most of what I read. I buy "Year's best" anthologies to see what other writers are doing, and flip through them going 'meh, pffft, blech' before throwing them disgustedly at the wall. One of the reasons why I write is that no-one (or very few people) are writing things that entertain or interest me.
How is it then, that these Glasgow and Edinburgh writers aren't just hugely world famous? This was the most throughly entertaining thing I attended at the con. All the stories genuinely enjoyable, and each included that vital element that's so missing from stuff that I read in 'Year's Best': They were fun. FUN. Remember that? Most of the writers proved to be born performers too, putting on accents and obviously enjoying themselves. I wonder if that's why I liked their work so much, because they were performing it with such vigor. Maybe if I read it in text form I'd be saying 'meh, pffft, blech'. But I don't think so.
I can't remember all the names of writers, nor all the titles, but here's what I do remember:
There was 'Hex', a slice of 'trad cyberpunk' which I really liked (of course), although I admit that I kinda suspected that the story's SPOILER[single female character would be dead by the end] (I've noticed this trend in science fiction, I'm convinced that females show a much higher per-capita body count than males, and it seems to particularly be true of noir-informed SF (Richard Morgan, I'm looking at you (and maybe you too, Neal Asher)). But perhaps I'm imagining it, or perhaps I've just been exposed to a particular set of random examples that make me think this. Anyways, it's irrelevant to the fact that I enjoyed the story and the author did a great job of doing all the voices. I will be looking out for more from this author.
One young woman did a simple tale of a deal with the devil, and she was possibly the best performer of the night, staying in character the whole way through and utterly confident with it. Her devil was completely defined as a character by the single line "It's never about what I want", which for me painted an entire backstory for him in a single sentence. This was one of two stories that ended with a "Oh, I should have seen that coming!" punchline, which I didn't see coming, but which was completely satisfactory when it arrived.
Mike Harding did the most crazed of the night's stories (Full disclosure, this man is the publisher who'll be releasing Ian Sales 'Rocket Science' anthology, which I'm going to be in. However, if you knew me you would know that I'd never speak well of someone to curry favor. If his story sucked I would simply have taken the coward's way out and claimed to have never attended the panel). This story featured the 'gene gun', an inventive device allowing the at-twenty-paces insertion of DNA into any target for fun and profit. In case we had trouble visualising this, Mike illustrated his story with flip charts that he tore away with such vim (the pace of the story was fast) that he eventually destroyed the prop. I did find his screeching scots/germanic voice for one of the characters got a little overwrought, but still it was a great story, and in fact maybe he was the best performer of the night.
One lady read two stories. With the first she seemed a little intimidated, and fell into the trap of reading fast through it without making eye contact with the audience. But she really pulled things back with her second offering "The Little Difference Engine that Could". This was the second story with an ending that had me thinking "Oh, I should have seen that coming!" This story had apparently been 'rejected for the market it was written for'. This amazes me, it's a great little story. Lady, dust it off, send it out, someone out there will love it.
Another person who seemed a bit overwhelmed was the author of 'Crocodile', a complex, multi-layered story about the demands that society makes on people, and how being in demand can give power, or take it away. This story had the main "I wish I'd written that" moment in it, with a metaphor "leaving behind his shed skin like a joyrider's burned-out car" that made me envious.
Neil Williamson's story had great ideas, but alas I got a little lost: He's softly spoken and I am having quite a little difficulty with the local accent (I noticed I was saying "Sorry?", "What?", "Pardon?" to people a lot, and wondered if I was suddenly becoming hard-of-hearing, before I realised that my sassanach ears were struggling with the local rhythmn). Still, I would like to read it, and will be looking into this one online.
Possibly the high-point of the night was Andrew Wilson's "The full stop at the end of the road", a story of war against punctuation gone wild. This one had an ending that I didn't see coming, and couldn't really have seen coming as the ideas in it were so madcap. It was performed with great gusto, and Andrew is another contender for best performer of the night.
At the end of all of this, when someone said "And now for a quick plug" I was genuinely hoping that they were going to say all these stories were available in some kind of book form. If so, I would have been right there with readies in my hand. Alas, it was not to be. It's really saying something though that I was actually hoping I could buy these stories. That's something rare, for me. Maybe it was all because of the performance aspect, maybe in text form I wouldn't enjoy them so much. I'm not sure. Maybe I'm more drunk than I think. But however you look at it these readings were one of the things I've most enjoyed at the con. How are these people not already famous and drowning in money like JK Rowling? It's a mystery to me.
Quite how this will help me to read at Eastercon though, I cannot imagine, as the bar is now set higher than it was when I went into that room.
Wednesday, 22 February 2012
Who reads my blog?
Watching the stats of who comes by this blog, I've noticed three major trends.
1) Hopefull Monsters - My writers group, who are required to leave some form of electronic papertrail pretending they are interested in outpourings, otherwise I will stop speaking to them.
2) Haters - I cannot deny it, these are my people. They find me because the title of the blog contains 'sucks', so I get an overwhelming amount of traffic coming from google searches of the form '<topic> sucks'. This is especially the case if it's a topic I've blogged about.
3) Deep Sea Fish Fetishists - One blogpost gets more attention than anything else I've ever written, and it's this one about 'Sci-Fi creatures aren't alien enough'. However, the people coming to it aren't interested in Sci-fi creatures, but rather in weird deep sea fish, particularly those with legs (tripod fish) and those that glow (anglerfish, etc).
There are a bunch of reaccuring visitors whom I often wonder 'who are these'? Who is the person in Friendswood, Texas? Who is the one in Paris who likes psy-trance? Who is the person in Bristol?
So, it's not really doing anything for promoting my writing, as none of these people are coming here for me! (Except, the Hopefull Monsters, but they already know all there is to know). Still, it's interesting to see who does turn up all the same.
1) Hopefull Monsters - My writers group, who are required to leave some form of electronic papertrail pretending they are interested in outpourings, otherwise I will stop speaking to them.
2) Haters - I cannot deny it, these are my people. They find me because the title of the blog contains 'sucks', so I get an overwhelming amount of traffic coming from google searches of the form '<topic> sucks'. This is especially the case if it's a topic I've blogged about.
3) Deep Sea Fish Fetishists - One blogpost gets more attention than anything else I've ever written, and it's this one about 'Sci-Fi creatures aren't alien enough'. However, the people coming to it aren't interested in Sci-fi creatures, but rather in weird deep sea fish, particularly those with legs (tripod fish) and those that glow (anglerfish, etc).
There are a bunch of reaccuring visitors whom I often wonder 'who are these'? Who is the person in Friendswood, Texas? Who is the one in Paris who likes psy-trance? Who is the person in Bristol?
So, it's not really doing anything for promoting my writing, as none of these people are coming here for me! (Except, the Hopefull Monsters, but they already know all there is to know). Still, it's interesting to see who does turn up all the same.
Wednesday, 8 February 2012
Drive: Doing it by the numbers
It must be me.
In recent years I've seen a trend towards people raving about movies, which I then go and see, all expectant and excited, only to come away hugely disappointed. One of the reasons I was so pleased about 'The Hurt Locker' sweeping the oscars was that I really liked that film, and was pleased to see that other people did too, so I wasn't a complete weirdo.
The latest is 'Drive'. Now, this is a movie that the great and the good have been feting as a masterpiece. Many 'top ten best movies of 2011' that I've seen put it at number one. Number one, best of the best. And understand, this is exactly my kind of movie: desperate criminals, tense getaway driving, noir/punk visuals, fast women and hot cars, mundane lives that nevertheless have a hint of cosmic tragedy, this is exactly the kind of film that would appeal to a middle-aged single male who doesn't get out enough, so I got this for myself as a treat.
It starts well, with a tense getaway from an armed robbery, Ryan Gosling's protagonist listening in on the police radio as he drives, thinking he's given them the slip and then hearing "We've got a visual" and having to race for it. The opening also introduces one of the stronges performers in the movie, the soundtrack, and that's not to say the actors are anything other than excellent, but the soundtrack is just great. But already, for me, the rot is starting to set in, because here we are in a car-chase in another american city. I've seen this a lot. A real lot. I've seen it a lot because I like these movies, but I found myself thinking "Just for once I wish this was 'Grand Theft Auto: Mumbai' or 'Grand Theft Auto: West Bromwich'.
It continues well when he meets his next-door-neighbor, Carey Mulligan, who manages to be luminously plain, by which I mean she's not made-up to look like something made out of pixels as women on the silver screen so often are, she looks like someone who might really be living next door to you. She's lit from within by the personality that Ms Mulligan breaths into the role. The acting in Carey and Ryan's scenes together is amazing, they take dialog the is just factual and flat (and is no doubt intended to be so) and act life into it, Ms Mulligan expressing more with her eyebrows than many lesser mortals can do with entire scenes of dialogue, and Gosling playing the 'creepy innocent': he might be good, he might be dangerous. In fact everyone is bringing their 'A' game here, every performance is excellent.
But... well, none of the characters are at all surprising. There's 'the kid' who is the supremely good driver, there's the 'the mentor', who is grooming the kid for greatness, there's 'the girl next door' who is also 'the damsel in distress', theres hoodlums, there's hookers, theres...
And they're all played well, but as characters they're very flat. The only one I actually cared about was Oscar Isaac's ex-con husband who's trying to turn good, but who... yes, stop me if you've heard it before... can't escape his past.
The one false note, for me, in the movie is 'Blanche', a ganster's-moll/streetwalker type who gets used as a bag-carrier in an armed robbery. She didn't strike me a someone well suited to armed robbery, and at first I thought this was because an expectation was being set up in me that was going to then be blown out of the water, and I was well up for seeing that. But it never happened. Blanche turns up to the robbery in six-inch heels (really, who turns up to a robbery in stillettos?) Goes in, collects the money, comes out... and nothing really happens that involves her. But then you discover she's only there to play out a later scene that's a reference to 'The Driver'.
And that's probably the biggest issue with this movie. I like things that reference other works, I like playing the game of spotting the references, but this felt like it was nothing but a lot of references strung together. There was very little here that I'd not seen someplace else, and nothing that really took me be surprise.
The film is very open about the debt it owes to such works as TheDriver and 'Miami Vice', and I detect hints of 'Le Samorai' and 'Taxi Driver' too. But the thing is that it starts to feel like we're slavishly working through an established formula. You know there's going to be the obligatory scene in a strip-club, and there is, with a load of young women stood about with their boobs on display. I never thought I'd say this, but boobs have gotten boring when used in scenes like this, do we really have to have the strip-club scene? The kid winds up with some money that belongs to 'the mob'. Someone gets killed, and the kid has to go on a revenge rampage. Fortunately he proves to be a one-man army. How come? I don't know, he just does, there's never any hint that he used to be in the marines or trained in the Shaolin temple, maybe it's expected that the audience will take that for granted, given how familar the whole thing is. By this time I really didn't care much. This is a movie with absolutely no new ideas.
So, there you have it. This is a movie with many good things, but you've probably already seen it before in one form or another. It's one you watch, enjoy reasonably well, and then never watch again. It's not something groundbreaking, and it's not last year's best movie, in fact I'd doubt it really belongs in the top ten.
In recent years I've seen a trend towards people raving about movies, which I then go and see, all expectant and excited, only to come away hugely disappointed. One of the reasons I was so pleased about 'The Hurt Locker' sweeping the oscars was that I really liked that film, and was pleased to see that other people did too, so I wasn't a complete weirdo.
The latest is 'Drive'. Now, this is a movie that the great and the good have been feting as a masterpiece. Many 'top ten best movies of 2011' that I've seen put it at number one. Number one, best of the best. And understand, this is exactly my kind of movie: desperate criminals, tense getaway driving, noir/punk visuals, fast women and hot cars, mundane lives that nevertheless have a hint of cosmic tragedy, this is exactly the kind of film that would appeal to a middle-aged single male who doesn't get out enough, so I got this for myself as a treat.
It starts well, with a tense getaway from an armed robbery, Ryan Gosling's protagonist listening in on the police radio as he drives, thinking he's given them the slip and then hearing "We've got a visual" and having to race for it. The opening also introduces one of the stronges performers in the movie, the soundtrack, and that's not to say the actors are anything other than excellent, but the soundtrack is just great. But already, for me, the rot is starting to set in, because here we are in a car-chase in another american city. I've seen this a lot. A real lot. I've seen it a lot because I like these movies, but I found myself thinking "Just for once I wish this was 'Grand Theft Auto: Mumbai' or 'Grand Theft Auto: West Bromwich'.
It continues well when he meets his next-door-neighbor, Carey Mulligan, who manages to be luminously plain, by which I mean she's not made-up to look like something made out of pixels as women on the silver screen so often are, she looks like someone who might really be living next door to you. She's lit from within by the personality that Ms Mulligan breaths into the role. The acting in Carey and Ryan's scenes together is amazing, they take dialog the is just factual and flat (and is no doubt intended to be so) and act life into it, Ms Mulligan expressing more with her eyebrows than many lesser mortals can do with entire scenes of dialogue, and Gosling playing the 'creepy innocent': he might be good, he might be dangerous. In fact everyone is bringing their 'A' game here, every performance is excellent.
But... well, none of the characters are at all surprising. There's 'the kid' who is the supremely good driver, there's the 'the mentor', who is grooming the kid for greatness, there's 'the girl next door' who is also 'the damsel in distress', theres hoodlums, there's hookers, theres...
And they're all played well, but as characters they're very flat. The only one I actually cared about was Oscar Isaac's ex-con husband who's trying to turn good, but who... yes, stop me if you've heard it before... can't escape his past.
The one false note, for me, in the movie is 'Blanche', a ganster's-moll/streetwalker type who gets used as a bag-carrier in an armed robbery. She didn't strike me a someone well suited to armed robbery, and at first I thought this was because an expectation was being set up in me that was going to then be blown out of the water, and I was well up for seeing that. But it never happened. Blanche turns up to the robbery in six-inch heels (really, who turns up to a robbery in stillettos?) Goes in, collects the money, comes out... and nothing really happens that involves her. But then you discover she's only there to play out a later scene that's a reference to 'The Driver'.
And that's probably the biggest issue with this movie. I like things that reference other works, I like playing the game of spotting the references, but this felt like it was nothing but a lot of references strung together. There was very little here that I'd not seen someplace else, and nothing that really took me be surprise.
The film is very open about the debt it owes to such works as TheDriver and 'Miami Vice', and I detect hints of 'Le Samorai' and 'Taxi Driver' too. But the thing is that it starts to feel like we're slavishly working through an established formula. You know there's going to be the obligatory scene in a strip-club, and there is, with a load of young women stood about with their boobs on display. I never thought I'd say this, but boobs have gotten boring when used in scenes like this, do we really have to have the strip-club scene? The kid winds up with some money that belongs to 'the mob'. Someone gets killed, and the kid has to go on a revenge rampage. Fortunately he proves to be a one-man army. How come? I don't know, he just does, there's never any hint that he used to be in the marines or trained in the Shaolin temple, maybe it's expected that the audience will take that for granted, given how familar the whole thing is. By this time I really didn't care much. This is a movie with absolutely no new ideas.
So, there you have it. This is a movie with many good things, but you've probably already seen it before in one form or another. It's one you watch, enjoy reasonably well, and then never watch again. It's not something groundbreaking, and it's not last year's best movie, in fact I'd doubt it really belongs in the top ten.
Sunday, 5 February 2012
If you are writing fiction in the past tense, you are just doing it wrong
This is a thing that's been bugging me for years, but I've finally been driven to post on this topic in response to two, in my opinion frankly dishonest, articles by 'authorities' in the fiction-writing world about present tense. I became aware of these articles through a blog-post by my fellow 'Hopefull Monster' Dwayne Minton, here.
Basically, young(ish) people are writing in the present tense, and the old guard are saying they shouldn't do that.
Over the years that I've been trying to be a science-fiction writer one thing has really gotten my goat more than any other: The formula. The formula is probably the reason that I started trying to write, because everything I read disappointed me. Everything was BORING, because everything followed the formula. When I was a member of the 'critters' online writing group, in which members post their works to be 'critted' by others, you'd always get a bunch of crits in which people spouted the formula at you. If you broke away from the 'standard' way of doing things, you'd get a deluge of people telling you "don't do that".
As every new writer is barraged with commands to, essentially, write like everyone else (or sometimes 'Write like Hemmingway') it's unsurprising that most of what comes out of the other end of the process tends to be so samey. Everyone is writing to the formula, and anyone who tries to break the mold gets shouted at until they get back into line. I had thought that this was uniquely a problem for science-fiction, which has long been somewhat backward-looking and nostalgic, unable to free itself from fannish admiration for the 'Golden age' of Heinlein and Asimov, but these articles imply that the rot spreads far wider than my chosen genre.
The formula looks something like this:
Third Person.
Past Tense.
There is a protagonist, an antagonist, a problem that exists between them. The Protagonist must try three times to solve the problem, failing the first two times and making it worse, and then succeed on the third attempt, re-establishing the status-quo.
There's lots more to the formula, of course, lots of extra points that I'm glossing over, but today I want to focus on just one aspect of the formula, the insistence that everything should be written in past tense.
I like present tense. I discovered this when I read Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash". Perhaps I'd read other things in the present before, but I don't remember them, but to this day I remember the sense of urgency and immediacy that present tense gave to 'Snow Crash'. It blew me away, it got my heart pumping, it DID NOT SUCK! I knew that if I ever wrote, I wanted to write like this.
What I didn't realise, of course, was how much of a trial it would be to write in the present tense, or to do anything that breaks the established, fossilised mold of 'The Formula'. First, my fellow writers insisted that present tense wasn't approved of by editors and readers. They were right, because editors reject stories and list 'use of present tense' as the reason why, and people who comment in online forums of markets say things like "Point off for unjustified use of the present tense".
So basically I shouldn't write the kind of stuff I want to write and read, I should write what these people want to read. But in that case why would I write at all? Consider, as a science-fiction short-story writer you can expect to make something like fifty pounds on average for a story sale, and that after you've put endless hours of effort into writing the story. In terms of financial reward for hours worked you would be better off waiting tables or collecting garbage for the council (and would get more side benefits too). But you're not writing to make money, right? You're writing for the satisfaction of art. Well then, if you're not writing what you want to write, you're wasting your time.
I like present tense, but everyone says its use in short-stories is 'unjustified'. So, when is present tense justified? If they were honest, most of the tense's detractors would say 'never', because that's what they really believe. However, they know that will sound bad, so they attempt to argue that present tense has a special stylistic purpose that gets blunted by overuse, like antibiotics. Here you can find Philip Pullman making just this argument. Tellingly he illustrates his argument with examples drawn from 19th Century literature. 19th Century? Weren't they still burning witches back then? Why would we look to the past to tell us how to do things in the 21st century? Well, taking a leaf out of Mr Pullman's book, I'm about to show why past tense is just plain wrong by looking back into the ancient past.
Once upon a time, long ago, there was no such thing as fiction. This sounds a surprising statement, because people have always told stories. But the important thing is that, way back in the past when we had an oral tradition and people could be professional story-tellers, the stories they told weren't fiction. They weren't stories, they were histories. Even though these stories were full of fanciful elements like gods and monsters, people believed they were true. Some people still believe these kinds of stories are true, and base their lives around them. When a story-teller performed his art, he didn't wow the audience with a new story, he didn't make new stories up. He told the same stories over and over, stories handed down through generations, stories of how the world came to be, how the tribe was formed, how the laws were laid down and how the animals were put under man's dominion, and so on and so forth. He was telling the people where their cultural identity and the world they lived in came from, and every word was fact. These were things that had happened, hence the stories were told in past tense. There was no need to build a feeling of tension or immediacy, as everyone had heard the stories before and knew what was going to happen next.
Modern fiction is an entirely different beast. In the modern age one is supposed to be careful when talking about books one has read and films one has seen, because otherwise you commit 'spoilers', you give away plot-points to people who've not seen/read those works yet, thus ruining their appreciation of them. Note that well, people's appreciation of modern fiction is tied up with not knowing what happens next. A modern fiction is supposed to be an exploration of new territory, springing surprises on the reader and challenging their expectations.
Now, why would you write something that's supposed to be new, supposed to be unspooling right in front of the reader, unexpected and unpredictable and happening NOW, in past tense? Why would you write genre fiction set in the breaking headlines of the modern age in past tense? Why would you write science fiction set in the future in past tense?
Doesn't make any sense, does it?
The use of past tense is purely a left-over from the ancient days when all stories were true and historical. It's inappropriate to modern fiction, and is only being used because of cultural inertia. Past tense is almost never justified, cases in which is might be include dramatised biographies, fictional memoirs or historical drama, because these stories are more in the tradition of the tribal oral history, they are telling us about things that are supposed to have happened in the past.
Present tense is almost always superior, creating in the reader's mind a sensation and a belief that things are happening in real time before them, and that the outcome is unknown.
Note well that what I've done here is I've made a case for why present tense should be used, based upon its effect. I've never seen anyone advance such an argument for past tense. The argument for past tense is always the same: "We've always done it this way."
Consider Mr Pullman's argument that the effects of present will be damaged by overuse. He says:
"If every sound you emit is a scream, a scream has no expressive value."
Mr Pullman's statements start from the position that past tense is the 'norm', and that present tense is a deviation from it (a scream). If we lived in a world in which present tense was the norm, then I could argue that past tense was a stylistic flourish that will be overused if people write whole novels in past tense. Thus his argument is really the same one that is always advanced for past tense, that we've always done it this way, and we should stick with the tradition (I call this 'The argument for Burning Witches').
Mr Pullman further says:
"What I dislike about the present-tense narrative is its limited range of expressiveness."
What the hell does this even mean? How can one tense be more expressive than another? Is the statement "I went to the shops" more expressive than "I am going to the shops?" This is just a ridiculous thing to say.
Then he complains:
"I feel claustrophobic, always pressed up against the immediate."
Yes. That's how good writing should make you feel, Mr Pullman, that's why present tense is demonstrably superior for storytelling. The writer's job is to pin the reader against a wall and scream in their face until the say "uncle". Well, okay, not always, if the writer is writing romance fiction, for instance, then the writer's job is to press the reader gently, but commandingly, against the wall and whisper breathily in their ear while picking their pocket. (No disrespect to romance fiction intended, it's a genre that increasingly interests me, but like any genre its basic job is to leave the reader feeling comfortably dazed and $6.99 poorer.)
Mr Pullman then goes on to compare present-tense fiction to all the unsteady-cam film-making that we're seeing these days:
"There's a close parallel here with the increasing use of the hand-held camera in cinema. Just like the present tense, the hand-held camera is an expressive device whose expressive power is being drained away by making it the only way of shooting a film. And I dislike that too, you won't be surprised to hear. I dislike it partly because it makes me feel sick, and partly because the camera never seems to be looking where I want to look, and partly because of the sheer monotony of texture that it brings, but mainly because of its falsehood. It seems to say: "We were there when these things happened. They were real. We didn't have time to adjust the focus on that shot or swing round in time to see who said those words or keep the camera steady. It was all happening there right in front of us. It was all urgent and real."
Well, of course it wasn't real and of course it wasn't urgent, and there was plenty of time to get the focus right, and if they'd wanted to they could have put the camera on a stand so it didn't shake about. They just wanted the film to look like a documentary when it wasn't one.
And this is what I mean by dishonesty, here's a person who writes fiction for a living complaining about movie-makers using techniques to suggest their movies are real. The whole construct of a story or a movie is an exercise in deception, one might just as well complain that "Mr Pullman writes stories as though the characters in them were real people, but we all know they are not, and he should quit lying to us!" The hand-held camera technique is part of the new language of cinema, the reason it's happening now is that hand-held cameras are widely available, where previously they were not. The existence of hand-held cameras for the masses has created a new visual vocabulary. It's equivalent to lens flare. Every time you've seen a showy long shot of... oh, I don't know, a mile-long space-station in low Earth orbit, and the Sun sweeps by in the background, you get that pretty train-of-hexagons effect, or halos, or something like that, you know? That's lens flare, an effect that only happens in the optics of a camera. Before there were cameras humans would not have known what lens-flare was (our eyes don't do it), but now it's omnipresent in movies, and we all accept it.
My dishonesty-detecting spidey-sense goes into overdrive when I read this:
I want all the young present-tense storytellers to allow themselves to stand back and show me a wider temporal perspective. I want them to feel able to say what happened, what usually happened, what sometimes happened, what had happened before something else happened, what might happen later, what actually did happen later, and so on: to use the full range of English tenses.
Then why, Mr Pullman, have you been silent up till now? You're reacting, as you admit himself, to the fact that "the use of the present tense in fiction had been getting more and more common, and I didn't like it." Why weren't we hearing you calling for a use of the 'full range of English tenses' when past tense was dominant, hmm? Why do you only ask 'young present-tense storytellers' to 'stand back and show me a wider temporal perspective'? Why don't you get on the case of all those old, past-tense storytellers to do the same (yes, I know many of them are dead, but they're not all gone).
Mr Pullman only wants present-tense storytellers to 'show him the full range of English tenses' because he's a past-tense chauvinist. Persuading even a few present-tense story tellers to step out of their tense lessens the amount of present tense writing that's about. Personally I'd like all past-tense writers to start showing me the full range of English tenses, and getting down and dirty with the present tense more often, and not just as a stylistic device, but for entire series of novels. If he were honestly wanting to see the full range of tenses used, Mr Pullman would be asking for past-tense writers to use the present tense some of the time too.
Continuing his hand-held-camera metaphor Mr Pullman says:
It's an abdication of narrative responsibility, in my view. The storyteller, in film or novel, should take charge of the story and not feel shifty about it. Put the camera in the place from which it can see the action most clearly. Make a decision about where that place is. Put it on something steady to stop that incessant jiggling about. Say what happened, and let the reader know when it happened and what caused it and what the consequences were, and tell me where the characters were and who else was present - and while you're at it, I'd like to know what they looked like and whether it was raining.
They don't 'feel shifty', they correctly feel the present tense is the better instrument for fiction. This is Mr Pullman trying to claim that they're doing this because they lack the confidence to use the manly and muscular past tense. That's bullshit, pure and simple. People are choosing present tense because it feels more real and immediate to them. If Mr Pullman doesn't like that, well that's a crying shame, but there's new generations coming up who don't feel the same way. Now, kindly get out of the road, Mr Pullman, or we'll be forced to run you down.
As for his recommendation that movie-makers should put the camera in the place where we can see the action most clearly, any horror movie director would tell you that this is some of the worst advice there's ever been. 'Alien', one of the greatest horror-movies ever made, works so well because the camera drifts about in a dreamy fashion, never showing you the whole creature (except for the final shots, in which it inevitably turns out to be some guy in a suit). The technique of having the camera pointing precisely the wrong way at moments of maximum tension is an old and much-used one. It's old and much used because it works. I assume that this recommendation is in some sense metaphorical, but if it doesn't stand up in within the metaphor, I doubt it will do so outside of it.
Mr Pullman then turns to that favorite resort of old codgers everywhere (including myself) and claims it's all political correctness gone mad:
But taking charge of the story is the one thing that some sensitive and artistic storytellers don't want to do. They've come to feel a timorous uncertainty about the right-on-ness of something so politically dodgy as telling a story in the first place. Who are we to say this happened and then that happened? Maybe it didn't, perhaps we're wrong, there are other points of view, truth is always provisional, knowledge is always partial, the narrator is always unreliable, and so on.
At this point he's just sadly ridiculous.
Finally he resorts to suggesting that the weak, impressionable minds of these young writers are being influenced by scurrilous teachers pursuing their own dark agenda:
Hensher may be right when he says that some of the pressure towards the present tense comes from creative writing courses, and some from the influence of the film treatment. Some of it, as he also suggests, is simply fashion. No doubt it will pass.
Yes, no doubt it will pass like novels and video-games and pop-music, and all those other faddish things that young people should never have started doing. Soon, surely, we'll all turn back to reading the Bible and the Greek classics. I have never attended a creative writing class, but I still want to write in the present tense. I admit though that I do watch movies, and hence am somewhat corrupted by modernity (or at least by the last century).
Worse I think, is this post by Michael Nye, managing editor of The Missouri Review. In this he says:
it would be nice to be able to safely assume that present-tense, then, is a choice. But in the present-tense stories coming across my desk, it rarely feels that way. Instead, it often feels like a short cut. In the fiction writing classes I've taught, present tense seems to be the default when the story lacks narrative drive.
Present tense, my students say, creates immediacy, makes the action more visceral, keeps the reader in the moment, and add tension because the narrator does not know how her/his story will end.
Mr Nye claims that present tense is 'the default when the story lacks narrative drive'. This is almost soviet-era double-think: present tense is not the default for anything, past tense is the default and claiming otherwise is disingenuous. Most fiction is written in past tense, and this has been the case for ages. Past tense has been the default because no-one has bothered to challenge to this inappropriate hold-over from ancient times until now.
Mr Nye has clearly asked his students why they use present tense, and they've told him why at some length, but this answer wasn't enough. He's still convinced they should use past tense, and that they're using present tense as a gimmick or a crutch. No, they're not, they know what they're doing and are using present tense for good reason. Sometimes the teacher should listen to their students, not just try and beat them into the orthodoxy.
Mr Nye further says:
All true perhaps, but more often than not, present tense feels gimmicky.
To you perhaps, but that's just you, Mr Nye, others don't feel the same way. This is arguing "I don't like it, so no-one should do it." GET OUT OF THE GODDAMN ROAD, MR NYE!!
Going on:
In the first person point-of-view, a character that knows the outcome has an amazing strength to focus on things that seemed irrelevant in the moment, but with hindsight, are quite significant. Great memoirs seem built, at least in part, on this idea. Instead, a present tense story makes me feel as if I'm reading a play. And, fiction isn't a screenplay: writing for the stage or film is an entirely different form, one that is interpreted by the actors and director, with minimal prose other than stage direction. Why would fiction want to replicate this?
Well past tense makes me feel like I'm reading a memoir, and fiction isn't a memoir (unless, admittedly, it's a fictional memoir, but much fiction isn't). A memoir is a re-telling of events long past, whose outcome is decided, it's an entirely different form. Why would fiction want to replicate this?
The weakness of these arguments is shown by how easily they are turned on their heads: they are all special pleading. So, a 'past-tenser' will claim that present-tense reads like a screenplay, while ignoring that past-tense reads like a memoir. They are simply arguing for the status-quo, for what they are used to, and that present tense should be 'kept for special circumstances'. However, most fiction is closer in intention to stage-plays than to memoirs, so it would be far more logical to make present-tense the default, and keep past tense for 'special circumstances' like the writing of fictional memoirs.
Mr Nye says:
Present-tense seems to be a default mode for someone who isn't carefully considering the style choices being made.
I find this insulting, dishonest, and bullshit of the highest calibre. How many past-tense writers do you think thought about their choice of tense? I think very few, past-tense has been the 'default' for generations, most people turn to it instinctively. It's still the default and therefore anyone choosing to go against it must have made a concious choice to do so. Furthermore we've seen that Mr Nye asked his students why they were doing it, and they gave him a clear answer, so they had considered it. However, no matter how much they explain their decisions to him, he will continue to insist that they haven't thought about it until they agree with him. I say it again, present tense is not the default mode for anything, if it were then most fiction would already be written in the present tense, and claiming that it's 'default' is just dishonest, I think. Past-tense is the default, people who chose to go against the default must have made a choice, they must have thought about it.
Mr Nye says of the present tense:
It flattens the story. It flattens emotional and narrative distance and lacks the sense of shadowing, the illumination and darkening of a character's world that strong narratives can create.
What does a 'flat' story look like, exactly? What is the opposite of a flat one, a 'mountainous' one, perhaps? These words don't mean anything. As for saying that present-tense lacks 'the illumination and darkening of a character's world that strong narratives can create' this is once again circular reasoning, as it assumes that present-tense stories are not 'strong narratives'. If they are strong narratives, and I say they are just as often as past tense ones are, then any argument here disappears in a puff of smoke (although I suspect there was never anything there to start with). Quite what kind of 'illumination and shadowing of a character's world' past tense can manage that present tense cannot, I cannot frankly imagine, I cannot imagine how changing 'was' to 'is' would suddenly turn the metaphorical lighting up or down. Either Mr Nye is not expressing himself clearly here, or he's indulging in metaphysics.
He further says:
The narrative choice suggests that there is nothing to remember about the past [and the past, to badly paraphrase Faulkner, isn't ever really in the past] and nothing to expect of the future.
Well, if this is true the past tense must extinguish both the present and the future, it must be the literary equivalent of an extinction event, a dead tense that says that everything is written, nothing can happen, and there is nothing to look forwards too. Again, this is special pleading, past-tensers claim that the present tense is uniquely destructive because it rules out the past and the future, while choosing to ignore that therefore the past must do the same to the present and the future.
Next we have:
Further, the present tense restricts the narration and, consequently, the writer. This restriction is deliberate, I'd argue, constipation from tackling bigger and broader events by eliminating the possibility of there being anything else that the characters [and, consequently, the narrator or the writer] must be conscious of other than the Here and Now. Opening up the story to the past takes courage and confidence, a writer's willingness to chisel back into the past for the bones of the story.
This is truly despicable. Firstly, yes, present tense restricts the narration and the writer, BUT SO DOES PAST TENSE, thus we see special pleading once more. Then Mr Nye goes on to argue that present-tense writers are suffering from 'constipation' and implying they are too cowardly to use the past. It would be just as valid to say that past-tense writer's are all cowards afraid of breaking the established mold, and who turn to the past tense because if its soothing 'everything is written' unchangingness, after all, past tense is the dead tense, in which everything is done and dusted. It's breaking the mold of past tense that takes courage and confidence, Mr Nye, especially when most of us have had to put up with people like you telling us it will send us blind.
In the comments to his article, Mr Nye says:
My sense is that this use of the present-tense is a way for a writer to not be permitted to look beyond the present. It's a restriction the writer puts on the story that, maybe, suggests an unwillingness to attempt something "bigger" in terms of time, memory, character.
Well then past tense is a way for the writer to not be permitted to look beyond the past. It's a restriction that the writer puts on a story that suggests an unwillingness to engage with the dangerous here-and-now, to strive for something more immediate, bigger, more threating. I'm tired of saying it: special pleading. Over and again these people claim that present tense is special, has all these problems, but past tense doesn't have the equivalent problems. It will come as no surprise that in the comments Mr Nye argues against future tense and flashbacks. Mr Nye is exposing 'The Formula', and anything that breaks 'the Formula' is suspect.
I'm shocked to see that Mr Nye's picture looks younger than me, how can someone so young be so old fashioned?
So, there we have it. I've presented an argument for present tense based upon its effect, and its appropriateness to modern fiction. I think it's pretty much the final argument, because I've yet to see anything from the past-tensers that doesn't consist of special pleading, unsubstantiated opinion, and the Argument for Burning Witches. All their arguments have essentially come down to the fact that, it's change, and they don't like change. Well, tough, change is coming.
By and large modern writers should be writing in the present tense. This is not to say that there aren't some cases where past-tense is appropriate, there are, for instance in fictional memoirs or fictional myths, but if we overuse the past-tense, then like antibiotics, it will cease to be effective.
Basically, young(ish) people are writing in the present tense, and the old guard are saying they shouldn't do that.
Over the years that I've been trying to be a science-fiction writer one thing has really gotten my goat more than any other: The formula. The formula is probably the reason that I started trying to write, because everything I read disappointed me. Everything was BORING, because everything followed the formula. When I was a member of the 'critters' online writing group, in which members post their works to be 'critted' by others, you'd always get a bunch of crits in which people spouted the formula at you. If you broke away from the 'standard' way of doing things, you'd get a deluge of people telling you "don't do that".
As every new writer is barraged with commands to, essentially, write like everyone else (or sometimes 'Write like Hemmingway') it's unsurprising that most of what comes out of the other end of the process tends to be so samey. Everyone is writing to the formula, and anyone who tries to break the mold gets shouted at until they get back into line. I had thought that this was uniquely a problem for science-fiction, which has long been somewhat backward-looking and nostalgic, unable to free itself from fannish admiration for the 'Golden age' of Heinlein and Asimov, but these articles imply that the rot spreads far wider than my chosen genre.
The formula looks something like this:
Third Person.
Past Tense.
There is a protagonist, an antagonist, a problem that exists between them. The Protagonist must try three times to solve the problem, failing the first two times and making it worse, and then succeed on the third attempt, re-establishing the status-quo.
There's lots more to the formula, of course, lots of extra points that I'm glossing over, but today I want to focus on just one aspect of the formula, the insistence that everything should be written in past tense.
I like present tense. I discovered this when I read Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash". Perhaps I'd read other things in the present before, but I don't remember them, but to this day I remember the sense of urgency and immediacy that present tense gave to 'Snow Crash'. It blew me away, it got my heart pumping, it DID NOT SUCK! I knew that if I ever wrote, I wanted to write like this.
What I didn't realise, of course, was how much of a trial it would be to write in the present tense, or to do anything that breaks the established, fossilised mold of 'The Formula'. First, my fellow writers insisted that present tense wasn't approved of by editors and readers. They were right, because editors reject stories and list 'use of present tense' as the reason why, and people who comment in online forums of markets say things like "Point off for unjustified use of the present tense".
So basically I shouldn't write the kind of stuff I want to write and read, I should write what these people want to read. But in that case why would I write at all? Consider, as a science-fiction short-story writer you can expect to make something like fifty pounds on average for a story sale, and that after you've put endless hours of effort into writing the story. In terms of financial reward for hours worked you would be better off waiting tables or collecting garbage for the council (and would get more side benefits too). But you're not writing to make money, right? You're writing for the satisfaction of art. Well then, if you're not writing what you want to write, you're wasting your time.
I like present tense, but everyone says its use in short-stories is 'unjustified'. So, when is present tense justified? If they were honest, most of the tense's detractors would say 'never', because that's what they really believe. However, they know that will sound bad, so they attempt to argue that present tense has a special stylistic purpose that gets blunted by overuse, like antibiotics. Here you can find Philip Pullman making just this argument. Tellingly he illustrates his argument with examples drawn from 19th Century literature. 19th Century? Weren't they still burning witches back then? Why would we look to the past to tell us how to do things in the 21st century? Well, taking a leaf out of Mr Pullman's book, I'm about to show why past tense is just plain wrong by looking back into the ancient past.
Once upon a time, long ago, there was no such thing as fiction. This sounds a surprising statement, because people have always told stories. But the important thing is that, way back in the past when we had an oral tradition and people could be professional story-tellers, the stories they told weren't fiction. They weren't stories, they were histories. Even though these stories were full of fanciful elements like gods and monsters, people believed they were true. Some people still believe these kinds of stories are true, and base their lives around them. When a story-teller performed his art, he didn't wow the audience with a new story, he didn't make new stories up. He told the same stories over and over, stories handed down through generations, stories of how the world came to be, how the tribe was formed, how the laws were laid down and how the animals were put under man's dominion, and so on and so forth. He was telling the people where their cultural identity and the world they lived in came from, and every word was fact. These were things that had happened, hence the stories were told in past tense. There was no need to build a feeling of tension or immediacy, as everyone had heard the stories before and knew what was going to happen next.
Modern fiction is an entirely different beast. In the modern age one is supposed to be careful when talking about books one has read and films one has seen, because otherwise you commit 'spoilers', you give away plot-points to people who've not seen/read those works yet, thus ruining their appreciation of them. Note that well, people's appreciation of modern fiction is tied up with not knowing what happens next. A modern fiction is supposed to be an exploration of new territory, springing surprises on the reader and challenging their expectations.
Now, why would you write something that's supposed to be new, supposed to be unspooling right in front of the reader, unexpected and unpredictable and happening NOW, in past tense? Why would you write genre fiction set in the breaking headlines of the modern age in past tense? Why would you write science fiction set in the future in past tense?
Doesn't make any sense, does it?
The use of past tense is purely a left-over from the ancient days when all stories were true and historical. It's inappropriate to modern fiction, and is only being used because of cultural inertia. Past tense is almost never justified, cases in which is might be include dramatised biographies, fictional memoirs or historical drama, because these stories are more in the tradition of the tribal oral history, they are telling us about things that are supposed to have happened in the past.
Present tense is almost always superior, creating in the reader's mind a sensation and a belief that things are happening in real time before them, and that the outcome is unknown.
Note well that what I've done here is I've made a case for why present tense should be used, based upon its effect. I've never seen anyone advance such an argument for past tense. The argument for past tense is always the same: "We've always done it this way."
Consider Mr Pullman's argument that the effects of present will be damaged by overuse. He says:
"If every sound you emit is a scream, a scream has no expressive value."
Mr Pullman's statements start from the position that past tense is the 'norm', and that present tense is a deviation from it (a scream). If we lived in a world in which present tense was the norm, then I could argue that past tense was a stylistic flourish that will be overused if people write whole novels in past tense. Thus his argument is really the same one that is always advanced for past tense, that we've always done it this way, and we should stick with the tradition (I call this 'The argument for Burning Witches').
Mr Pullman further says:
"What I dislike about the present-tense narrative is its limited range of expressiveness."
What the hell does this even mean? How can one tense be more expressive than another? Is the statement "I went to the shops" more expressive than "I am going to the shops?" This is just a ridiculous thing to say.
Then he complains:
"I feel claustrophobic, always pressed up against the immediate."
Yes. That's how good writing should make you feel, Mr Pullman, that's why present tense is demonstrably superior for storytelling. The writer's job is to pin the reader against a wall and scream in their face until the say "uncle". Well, okay, not always, if the writer is writing romance fiction, for instance, then the writer's job is to press the reader gently, but commandingly, against the wall and whisper breathily in their ear while picking their pocket. (No disrespect to romance fiction intended, it's a genre that increasingly interests me, but like any genre its basic job is to leave the reader feeling comfortably dazed and $6.99 poorer.)
Mr Pullman then goes on to compare present-tense fiction to all the unsteady-cam film-making that we're seeing these days:
"There's a close parallel here with the increasing use of the hand-held camera in cinema. Just like the present tense, the hand-held camera is an expressive device whose expressive power is being drained away by making it the only way of shooting a film. And I dislike that too, you won't be surprised to hear. I dislike it partly because it makes me feel sick, and partly because the camera never seems to be looking where I want to look, and partly because of the sheer monotony of texture that it brings, but mainly because of its falsehood. It seems to say: "We were there when these things happened. They were real. We didn't have time to adjust the focus on that shot or swing round in time to see who said those words or keep the camera steady. It was all happening there right in front of us. It was all urgent and real."
Well, of course it wasn't real and of course it wasn't urgent, and there was plenty of time to get the focus right, and if they'd wanted to they could have put the camera on a stand so it didn't shake about. They just wanted the film to look like a documentary when it wasn't one.
And this is what I mean by dishonesty, here's a person who writes fiction for a living complaining about movie-makers using techniques to suggest their movies are real. The whole construct of a story or a movie is an exercise in deception, one might just as well complain that "Mr Pullman writes stories as though the characters in them were real people, but we all know they are not, and he should quit lying to us!" The hand-held camera technique is part of the new language of cinema, the reason it's happening now is that hand-held cameras are widely available, where previously they were not. The existence of hand-held cameras for the masses has created a new visual vocabulary. It's equivalent to lens flare. Every time you've seen a showy long shot of... oh, I don't know, a mile-long space-station in low Earth orbit, and the Sun sweeps by in the background, you get that pretty train-of-hexagons effect, or halos, or something like that, you know? That's lens flare, an effect that only happens in the optics of a camera. Before there were cameras humans would not have known what lens-flare was (our eyes don't do it), but now it's omnipresent in movies, and we all accept it.
My dishonesty-detecting spidey-sense goes into overdrive when I read this:
I want all the young present-tense storytellers to allow themselves to stand back and show me a wider temporal perspective. I want them to feel able to say what happened, what usually happened, what sometimes happened, what had happened before something else happened, what might happen later, what actually did happen later, and so on: to use the full range of English tenses.
Then why, Mr Pullman, have you been silent up till now? You're reacting, as you admit himself, to the fact that "the use of the present tense in fiction had been getting more and more common, and I didn't like it." Why weren't we hearing you calling for a use of the 'full range of English tenses' when past tense was dominant, hmm? Why do you only ask 'young present-tense storytellers' to 'stand back and show me a wider temporal perspective'? Why don't you get on the case of all those old, past-tense storytellers to do the same (yes, I know many of them are dead, but they're not all gone).
Mr Pullman only wants present-tense storytellers to 'show him the full range of English tenses' because he's a past-tense chauvinist. Persuading even a few present-tense story tellers to step out of their tense lessens the amount of present tense writing that's about. Personally I'd like all past-tense writers to start showing me the full range of English tenses, and getting down and dirty with the present tense more often, and not just as a stylistic device, but for entire series of novels. If he were honestly wanting to see the full range of tenses used, Mr Pullman would be asking for past-tense writers to use the present tense some of the time too.
Continuing his hand-held-camera metaphor Mr Pullman says:
It's an abdication of narrative responsibility, in my view. The storyteller, in film or novel, should take charge of the story and not feel shifty about it. Put the camera in the place from which it can see the action most clearly. Make a decision about where that place is. Put it on something steady to stop that incessant jiggling about. Say what happened, and let the reader know when it happened and what caused it and what the consequences were, and tell me where the characters were and who else was present - and while you're at it, I'd like to know what they looked like and whether it was raining.
They don't 'feel shifty', they correctly feel the present tense is the better instrument for fiction. This is Mr Pullman trying to claim that they're doing this because they lack the confidence to use the manly and muscular past tense. That's bullshit, pure and simple. People are choosing present tense because it feels more real and immediate to them. If Mr Pullman doesn't like that, well that's a crying shame, but there's new generations coming up who don't feel the same way. Now, kindly get out of the road, Mr Pullman, or we'll be forced to run you down.
As for his recommendation that movie-makers should put the camera in the place where we can see the action most clearly, any horror movie director would tell you that this is some of the worst advice there's ever been. 'Alien', one of the greatest horror-movies ever made, works so well because the camera drifts about in a dreamy fashion, never showing you the whole creature (except for the final shots, in which it inevitably turns out to be some guy in a suit). The technique of having the camera pointing precisely the wrong way at moments of maximum tension is an old and much-used one. It's old and much used because it works. I assume that this recommendation is in some sense metaphorical, but if it doesn't stand up in within the metaphor, I doubt it will do so outside of it.
Mr Pullman then turns to that favorite resort of old codgers everywhere (including myself) and claims it's all political correctness gone mad:
But taking charge of the story is the one thing that some sensitive and artistic storytellers don't want to do. They've come to feel a timorous uncertainty about the right-on-ness of something so politically dodgy as telling a story in the first place. Who are we to say this happened and then that happened? Maybe it didn't, perhaps we're wrong, there are other points of view, truth is always provisional, knowledge is always partial, the narrator is always unreliable, and so on.
At this point he's just sadly ridiculous.
Finally he resorts to suggesting that the weak, impressionable minds of these young writers are being influenced by scurrilous teachers pursuing their own dark agenda:
Hensher may be right when he says that some of the pressure towards the present tense comes from creative writing courses, and some from the influence of the film treatment. Some of it, as he also suggests, is simply fashion. No doubt it will pass.
Yes, no doubt it will pass like novels and video-games and pop-music, and all those other faddish things that young people should never have started doing. Soon, surely, we'll all turn back to reading the Bible and the Greek classics. I have never attended a creative writing class, but I still want to write in the present tense. I admit though that I do watch movies, and hence am somewhat corrupted by modernity (or at least by the last century).
Worse I think, is this post by Michael Nye, managing editor of The Missouri Review. In this he says:
it would be nice to be able to safely assume that present-tense, then, is a choice. But in the present-tense stories coming across my desk, it rarely feels that way. Instead, it often feels like a short cut. In the fiction writing classes I've taught, present tense seems to be the default when the story lacks narrative drive.
Present tense, my students say, creates immediacy, makes the action more visceral, keeps the reader in the moment, and add tension because the narrator does not know how her/his story will end.
Mr Nye claims that present tense is 'the default when the story lacks narrative drive'. This is almost soviet-era double-think: present tense is not the default for anything, past tense is the default and claiming otherwise is disingenuous. Most fiction is written in past tense, and this has been the case for ages. Past tense has been the default because no-one has bothered to challenge to this inappropriate hold-over from ancient times until now.
Mr Nye has clearly asked his students why they use present tense, and they've told him why at some length, but this answer wasn't enough. He's still convinced they should use past tense, and that they're using present tense as a gimmick or a crutch. No, they're not, they know what they're doing and are using present tense for good reason. Sometimes the teacher should listen to their students, not just try and beat them into the orthodoxy.
Mr Nye further says:
All true perhaps, but more often than not, present tense feels gimmicky.
To you perhaps, but that's just you, Mr Nye, others don't feel the same way. This is arguing "I don't like it, so no-one should do it." GET OUT OF THE GODDAMN ROAD, MR NYE!!
Going on:
In the first person point-of-view, a character that knows the outcome has an amazing strength to focus on things that seemed irrelevant in the moment, but with hindsight, are quite significant. Great memoirs seem built, at least in part, on this idea. Instead, a present tense story makes me feel as if I'm reading a play. And, fiction isn't a screenplay: writing for the stage or film is an entirely different form, one that is interpreted by the actors and director, with minimal prose other than stage direction. Why would fiction want to replicate this?
Well past tense makes me feel like I'm reading a memoir, and fiction isn't a memoir (unless, admittedly, it's a fictional memoir, but much fiction isn't). A memoir is a re-telling of events long past, whose outcome is decided, it's an entirely different form. Why would fiction want to replicate this?
The weakness of these arguments is shown by how easily they are turned on their heads: they are all special pleading. So, a 'past-tenser' will claim that present-tense reads like a screenplay, while ignoring that past-tense reads like a memoir. They are simply arguing for the status-quo, for what they are used to, and that present tense should be 'kept for special circumstances'. However, most fiction is closer in intention to stage-plays than to memoirs, so it would be far more logical to make present-tense the default, and keep past tense for 'special circumstances' like the writing of fictional memoirs.
Mr Nye says:
Present-tense seems to be a default mode for someone who isn't carefully considering the style choices being made.
I find this insulting, dishonest, and bullshit of the highest calibre. How many past-tense writers do you think thought about their choice of tense? I think very few, past-tense has been the 'default' for generations, most people turn to it instinctively. It's still the default and therefore anyone choosing to go against it must have made a concious choice to do so. Furthermore we've seen that Mr Nye asked his students why they were doing it, and they gave him a clear answer, so they had considered it. However, no matter how much they explain their decisions to him, he will continue to insist that they haven't thought about it until they agree with him. I say it again, present tense is not the default mode for anything, if it were then most fiction would already be written in the present tense, and claiming that it's 'default' is just dishonest, I think. Past-tense is the default, people who chose to go against the default must have made a choice, they must have thought about it.
Mr Nye says of the present tense:
It flattens the story. It flattens emotional and narrative distance and lacks the sense of shadowing, the illumination and darkening of a character's world that strong narratives can create.
What does a 'flat' story look like, exactly? What is the opposite of a flat one, a 'mountainous' one, perhaps? These words don't mean anything. As for saying that present-tense lacks 'the illumination and darkening of a character's world that strong narratives can create' this is once again circular reasoning, as it assumes that present-tense stories are not 'strong narratives'. If they are strong narratives, and I say they are just as often as past tense ones are, then any argument here disappears in a puff of smoke (although I suspect there was never anything there to start with). Quite what kind of 'illumination and shadowing of a character's world' past tense can manage that present tense cannot, I cannot frankly imagine, I cannot imagine how changing 'was' to 'is' would suddenly turn the metaphorical lighting up or down. Either Mr Nye is not expressing himself clearly here, or he's indulging in metaphysics.
He further says:
The narrative choice suggests that there is nothing to remember about the past [and the past, to badly paraphrase Faulkner, isn't ever really in the past] and nothing to expect of the future.
Well, if this is true the past tense must extinguish both the present and the future, it must be the literary equivalent of an extinction event, a dead tense that says that everything is written, nothing can happen, and there is nothing to look forwards too. Again, this is special pleading, past-tensers claim that the present tense is uniquely destructive because it rules out the past and the future, while choosing to ignore that therefore the past must do the same to the present and the future.
Next we have:
Further, the present tense restricts the narration and, consequently, the writer. This restriction is deliberate, I'd argue, constipation from tackling bigger and broader events by eliminating the possibility of there being anything else that the characters [and, consequently, the narrator or the writer] must be conscious of other than the Here and Now. Opening up the story to the past takes courage and confidence, a writer's willingness to chisel back into the past for the bones of the story.
This is truly despicable. Firstly, yes, present tense restricts the narration and the writer, BUT SO DOES PAST TENSE, thus we see special pleading once more. Then Mr Nye goes on to argue that present-tense writers are suffering from 'constipation' and implying they are too cowardly to use the past. It would be just as valid to say that past-tense writer's are all cowards afraid of breaking the established mold, and who turn to the past tense because if its soothing 'everything is written' unchangingness, after all, past tense is the dead tense, in which everything is done and dusted. It's breaking the mold of past tense that takes courage and confidence, Mr Nye, especially when most of us have had to put up with people like you telling us it will send us blind.
In the comments to his article, Mr Nye says:
My sense is that this use of the present-tense is a way for a writer to not be permitted to look beyond the present. It's a restriction the writer puts on the story that, maybe, suggests an unwillingness to attempt something "bigger" in terms of time, memory, character.
Well then past tense is a way for the writer to not be permitted to look beyond the past. It's a restriction that the writer puts on a story that suggests an unwillingness to engage with the dangerous here-and-now, to strive for something more immediate, bigger, more threating. I'm tired of saying it: special pleading. Over and again these people claim that present tense is special, has all these problems, but past tense doesn't have the equivalent problems. It will come as no surprise that in the comments Mr Nye argues against future tense and flashbacks. Mr Nye is exposing 'The Formula', and anything that breaks 'the Formula' is suspect.
I'm shocked to see that Mr Nye's picture looks younger than me, how can someone so young be so old fashioned?
So, there we have it. I've presented an argument for present tense based upon its effect, and its appropriateness to modern fiction. I think it's pretty much the final argument, because I've yet to see anything from the past-tensers that doesn't consist of special pleading, unsubstantiated opinion, and the Argument for Burning Witches. All their arguments have essentially come down to the fact that, it's change, and they don't like change. Well, tough, change is coming.
By and large modern writers should be writing in the present tense. This is not to say that there aren't some cases where past-tense is appropriate, there are, for instance in fictional memoirs or fictional myths, but if we overuse the past-tense, then like antibiotics, it will cease to be effective.
Friday, 3 February 2012
My First Sale of 2012
So, my first sale of 2012, "Love in a time of Bio-mal" is bought by "Electric Spec". This story idled for about a year, because I felt there was something not right about it. I sent it out a couple of times, and then set it aside. Something wasn't right.
I think it was the title. It started out as "Lurker Love Potion No. 13" but that was silly. Then it became "Bio-mal for my Beloved", but that sounded a bit too Chandler. Then, during an unconnected "Title Brainstorm Session" one of my fellow 'Hopefull Monsters' (my writing group. Yes, the extra 'l' is official) came up with "Love in a time of H1N1". I substituted bird-flu for Bio-mal (biological malware) and suddenly felt much better about it, and so did the Electric Spec team.
Now I need to write something new, I've placed most of the saleable stuff I've written. Problem is that I seem to be a little dry on ideas these days.
I think it was the title. It started out as "Lurker Love Potion No. 13" but that was silly. Then it became "Bio-mal for my Beloved", but that sounded a bit too Chandler. Then, during an unconnected "Title Brainstorm Session" one of my fellow 'Hopefull Monsters' (my writing group. Yes, the extra 'l' is official) came up with "Love in a time of H1N1". I substituted bird-flu for Bio-mal (biological malware) and suddenly felt much better about it, and so did the Electric Spec team.
Now I need to write something new, I've placed most of the saleable stuff I've written. Problem is that I seem to be a little dry on ideas these days.
Tuesday, 31 January 2012
Bad Logic Episode 2: Superbugs
Almost a year ago I wrote Bad Logic Episode 1. At the time I thought I'd come across huge amounts of Bad Logic on the web and in life. Sadly, I now have learned that most of the crazy stuff people write and say isn't bad logic, it's not logic at all, it's out flat out crazy that you almost can't argue with it.
However, I've found another one, and it's a special one because the arguments against the claims being advanced touch on the plot of an SF story that I've just published over at Daily Science Fiction
I found this article claiming that a recently discovered strain of antibiotic-resistant e.coli was BIOENGINEERED IN THE LABORATORIES OF BIG PHARMA. Furthermore, the claim is advanced that this is a deliberate ploy to seize control of the global food supply by contaminating 'natural' foods.
However, I've found another one, and it's a special one because the arguments against the claims being advanced touch on the plot of an SF story that I've just published over at Daily Science Fiction
I found this article claiming that a recently discovered strain of antibiotic-resistant e.coli was BIOENGINEERED IN THE LABORATORIES OF BIG PHARMA. Furthermore, the claim is advanced that this is a deliberate ploy to seize control of the global food supply by contaminating 'natural' foods.
Thursday, 19 January 2012
Stop Using Superpowers to Steal my Fiction Ideas
I am getting mighty tired of certain 'writers' and 'artists' using telepathy and clairvoyance (possibly time-travel, but we all know that's impossible) to steal my fiction ideas before they ever make it to print!
Time and time again I have stumbled across works containing characters, settings or concepts that were uniquely my own, and sometimes these works were produced years, decades, or even centuries before my seminal idea. Sometimes the similarities are so obvious that even names are similar (or are once translated back to English from Sumerian or whatever), they've made no effort to cover their tracks!
This is happening far to often to be a co-incidence, it is clearly a conspiracy. To these perfidious rogues I say "Stoppit, or there'll be trouble! You know who you are." For now I am applying a new tinfoil-hat writing regime.
Time and time again I have stumbled across works containing characters, settings or concepts that were uniquely my own, and sometimes these works were produced years, decades, or even centuries before my seminal idea. Sometimes the similarities are so obvious that even names are similar (or are once translated back to English from Sumerian or whatever), they've made no effort to cover their tracks!
This is happening far to often to be a co-incidence, it is clearly a conspiracy. To these perfidious rogues I say "Stoppit, or there'll be trouble! You know who you are." For now I am applying a new tinfoil-hat writing regime.
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