So, postmodernism. Here’s a thumbnail definition, in case you’re interested: you know that musical flourish, duh-duh-durr!, those three doom-y crashing chords? Once upon a time they worked in context to send genuine tingles of dread through a cinema audience. Now to hear them is to think inevitably of the Dramatic Chipmunk half-turning to look at the camera over his chipmunky shoulder, eyes wild. Which is to say, that musical flourish has lost its original affect; it has become a depthless quotation in a shifting network of signification. It is now comic-bathetic instead of actually thrilling. That, to deploy the technical term, is what we call ‘postmodernism’, and one little-remarked-upon consequence of this state of affairs is the elevation of Godwin’s Law to an aesthetic benchmark.
An amusing and illustrating aside from Adam Roberts’s blog, in a post about John Meaney’s latest novel. I wouldn’t normally quote-and-run but this made me laugh, so ENJOY.
(In response to the last line I wanted to post a Futurama video clip; a Twilight Zone spoof where a man is trapped in a horrible nightmare. He pleads to someone for help: “why would I help you? You’re Hitler!” But alas, I cannot find it online.)
…please, please try and get their voice right.
There’s nothing that ruins a story faster than characters who talk (or subvocalise) in an entirely unconvincing way. Based on personal and anecdotal experience it seems sprogs, kids and teens are the demographic writers tend to struggle with the most. This is understandable, to an extent; youth culture has a pace of change more rapid than science fiction has been able to boast for years. But you don’t get to make excuses for stories.
I don’t have any answers for writers who want to try and write contemporary youth well, but I’d suggest that irreverent cartoons beloved of children and young teens, TV shows that actually feature young actors (The Imbetweeners and Skins spring to mind, though I’ve seen little of either), and paying attention to the way groups of young people talk and interact is a more likely route to success than some painfully forced artifice that doesn’t even closely resemble your own youth.
Overall, though, you have to remember that kids are just like any other people. They don’t habitually pepper their sentences with buzzwords and pop-culture references – though in certain contexts they might. Some kids might use embarrassing substitutions like “freaking” or archaisms like “naff”, whereas others will cuss with the best of them. Whatever. If you are writing a character you need to ground them in a context, and that context will inform how they think, act and talk.
Tobias Buckell, one of a number of writers and bloggers who joined in with Post A Rejection Letter Friday, has compiled a handy list of participants which you can view here. There are a few others who posted letters a little late, and if you’re interested most of them can be found in the comments/trackback thread to the original post.
Thanks and respect to everyone who joined in! What can I say beyond I hope it doesn’t become a regular event…
Since this blog is partly about me as a writer, I thought I should do the done thing and post occasionally about what I’m working on.
I’ve just finished another story for my writing group, a 2,500 word fantasy/horror tale. I started the first draft back in 2005, and although it’s now mostly rewritten it’s nice to finally see the project to completion.
It’s now been sent off to my group so I’ll wait and see what they come back with. For the time being I have some home recording to do…
I’ve just finished the first draft of a story for my BSFA Orbiter writing group (at the moment it’s called Underground Railroad, and is a story full of hope, warm feelings and Care Bears). Although I could just be talking nonsense through the afterglow of finishing a story of some length (about 4,800 words, which is hardly huge, but it’s rather longer than flash) it’s given me something to mull over concerning writing.
Writing fiction is hard for me. Some part of my brain is very lazy, and it likes to avoid hard work. This seems a little strange to the conscious side of me because 1.) I actually do far more with my time than many people I know, and 2.) when I start writing I am generally very happy with what comes out (sometimes something jarring will stop me – like ridiculous asides and parentheses that ruin the flow of prose – but for the most part my first draft is fine right up until changes need making after I get crits back about theme, character and structure. You know, the big stuff). But this is how I seem to regard these things: nasty old hard work and effort. So for me the hardest part about writing fiction, and to a lesser extent all writing, is persuading myself that I should get on and do it.
I’ve tried all the usual tricks: setting a daily or weekly target, offering to reward myself, trying to punish myself, adopting a worldview or lifestyle that encourages writing, using tools and spreadsheets, putting dictionaries and notepads in convenient places, buying a dictaphone to record ideas, sticking inspirational quotes everywhere, leaving unfinished stories in files on my computer desktop… if you write and lack real discipline, you probably know the sort of thing I mean.
But finishing this story off tonight has made me think something (probably daft): I’ve never really considered my, you know, physiological state of being.
By which I mean I’m feeling quite tired.
I’m not very tired, like I was last night. Staying up until the wee hours drinking delicious wine, smoking nasty cigarettes, and singing along to old Against Me! songs will leave one tired the following evening after a full day at work. But I’m not particularly refreshed or full of energy: I got some sleep last night, not too much, but just enough.
And tonight when I sat down to write I fell into the trance of it pretty quickly, just totally focused on writing, on letting the prose flow out and looking at it and nodding and deliberating over the correct word to use but never getting distracted. That’s perhaps a good word to focus on: distracted. I wasn’t distracted because I was tired enough to be single-minded, but I was able to write because I wasn’t so tired that I just chilled out with some entertainment “for a bit”.
Then again I’m also quite hungry, so maybe it’s that. The Gaslight Anthem sing, “stay hungry, stay free, and do the best that you can.” They might be on to something.
Or I’m actually (and this is an ever-present fear of mine when in the company of Smarts) just stating, in an overly verbose fashion, something that has been perfectly evident to everyone else for a jolly long time.
Or…
I think I’d better eat something and get a half-decent night’s sleep.