That link is broken. Knock the o out from between the equals sign and the first quote mark.

Posted February 24, 2004 12:30 AM by Avram

What Avram said, and the entire piece might be summed up as follows:

If you had to tie yourself into a pretzel to write that part, you might advise the reader that they can instead spend that reading time on a visit to the bakery for a real pretzel.

Perhaps I'm brave or even bigheaded for going there, but such was my takeaway.

(I wish he'd raised the business of the turtle in Grapes of Wrath for contrast... and I devour Steinbeck, all the same.)

Posted February 24, 2004 2:10 AM by ben

This should be a fixed URL:

Elmore Leonard’s ten rules

Posted February 24, 2004 4:10 AM by John Schoffstall

Hooptedoodle is a fine thing when done well, but I find it seldom is.

Posted February 24, 2004 4:13 AM by Mitch Wagner

I'd comment at longer length, but right now I have to log off and go work on my novel's prologue.

Posted February 24, 2004 7:17 AM by Bruce Arthurs

Damn, there goes my opening sentence: "It was a dark and stormy night..."

Posted February 24, 2004 8:37 AM by chris

Finally! Someone admits that prologues are the most unnecessary, annoying thing in fiction.

Posted February 24, 2004 8:47 AM by Mer Haskell

All fixed.

The rule Patrick and I most admired -- aside from all of them, that is -- was #10, "Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip."

Posted February 24, 2004 8:50 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Hmm. Far as I can tell, these ten rules all boil down to one thing: "good prose is unobtrusive". Alternatively: "pyrotechnic prose may light your fire, but your readers will most likely respond by reaching for the extinguisher."

And, most importantly of all, "never use ten words where one will do."

Posted February 24, 2004 9:04 AM by Charlie Stross

Here's another set of rules - not necessarily *better*, but darn good: http://www.holtuncensored.com/ten_mistakes.html.

Posted February 24, 2004 9:13 AM by j blegaa

Well, some good prose is unobtrusive. Some good prose stops you in your tracks, forcing you to go back and read that last paragraph again because it was so good. Some good prose works force you to constantly think about the fact that you're reading, which is 'obtrusive' if you look at it the wrong way.
But no matter how visible you intend your prose to be, its probably a good idea not to use many exclamation points, or synonyms for 'said', or adverbs. They're not just visible - they're ugly.

Posted February 24, 2004 9:37 AM by Ray

Just to be flippant, what's wrong with "Write what you think is cool?"

Posted February 24, 2004 9:51 AM by Skwid

The rules are entertaining, but when I read them I think of Sebald's "Vertigo" (with Sebald's own, unique unbroken paragraphs filled with seemingly disconnected ramble that flows beautifully), or Agee and Evan's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (another favorite, where Agee spends pages just describing a simple kitchen), and I think that there are no real rules of writing -- there are people who want to be writers, and people who are writers, and rules are made for the former but broken by the latter.

And that was one long paragraph, probably breaking some rules along the way. Does that make me a writer?

Too circular, my head is imploding, my pen leaking. I said.

Posted February 24, 2004 10:22 AM by Shelley

And more in the same vein: Turkey City.

Posted February 24, 2004 10:29 AM by Ray Girvan

I can see the point of these, if what you want is to write like Elmore Leonard. On the other hand, when I think what an application of these rules would do to The Worm Ouroboros or the Gormenghast books, or even The Lord of the Rings, I find myself wanting to carefully take them somewhere a long way away and leave them there.

Posted February 24, 2004 10:30 AM by Emmet

Skwid: nothing wrong with it at all -- as long as you recognize that the readers may not share your opinion.

Posted February 24, 2004 10:32 AM by Charlie Stross

Lovely. It boils down to "write from a reader's point of view," at least in the rewrite stage (personal emendation--do whatever you have to in the first draft stage).

re: Going easy on dialect: I couldn't agree more, unless you're Mark Twain, and we already had one of him. Even Shaw, who wanted everyone to spell everything phonetically, wrote exactly three lines of Eliza Doolittle's Cockney as pronounced, then, giving up, wrote:

[Here, with apologies, this desperate attempt to represent her dialect without a phonetic alphabet must be abandoned as unintelligible outside London.]

If he couldn't do it, you can't either--and no one wants to try to read it!

Posted February 24, 2004 10:36 AM by Rachel Reiss

Good stuff that, and not just for fiction. I can think of many technical documents I read that could have done without the part that readers tend to skip. Good technical prose is only as obtrusive as necessary.

But then, I've been reading too much of the stuff recently.

Posted February 24, 2004 10:45 AM by Andrew Shultz

Emmet: Thank you for saying what I was thinking.

Teresa: I never skip anything when I read. Nothing, not the back copy, not the summary on the endflaps, not the verso of the tp. So of *course* I don't skip any of the actual story.

MKK

Posted February 24, 2004 11:21 AM by Mary Kay

Hmm. I read things for different reasons. Some writers are good at spinning a good yarn, and others at sentential craftsmanship. These are a great set of rules for the former, but not so good for the latter. If the plot is the only important thing, excellent rules to follow.

But I've read stories where hardly anything happened, hardly anyone said anything, and most of the description was of the inside of the characters' heads. Alice Walker's "Olive Oil" left me in tears, for example. Elmore Leonard could not have written it, and nor could Alice Walker if she'd been following his rules.

Still, I'll keep them in mind...if only to aid in understanding when I get my rejection slips.

Posted February 24, 2004 12:04 PM by Xopher

Ah, if only Little, Big had been written with those rules in mind. Then I wouldn't weep with envious despair at the beauty of the prose, and at how I'll never be John Crowley; nor would I be rendered impotent at my keyboard afterward for hours at a stretch.

Posted February 24, 2004 12:21 PM by Dan Layman-Kennedy

MKK: but do you save the cover copy & blurbs for last? I've started doing that because I'm becoming more and more spoiler-averse.

Posted February 24, 2004 12:22 PM by Kate Nepveu

Elmore Leonard's advice actually boils down to "make the parts readers tend to skip easily skippable, so the readers can get to know them better on the second or third re-read." For me, a book without the "skippable" parts generally isn't worth re-reading, however good I thought it was. I've read a few of Leonard's books, for instance, and while I remember enjoying them immensely at the time, I can't remember a single thing about the books themselves. Whereas I have to admit I could eat Italo Calvino's books for breakfast every day, even though they tend to consist of all the skippable bits with the story surgically removed.

Posted February 24, 2004 12:37 PM by Seth Ellis

3. Never use a verb other than ''said'' to carry dialogue.

To this day, I still read James Blish's two books, the Issues at Hand volumes, and especially enjoy rereading his essays on "Said-Bookisms."

"Good morning," he pole-vaulted.

Posted February 24, 2004 1:08 PM by John Farrell

"3. Never use a verb other than ''said'' to carry dialogue."

I've just read a few pages in two of my favorite books, Beryl Markham's "West With the Night" and John Varley's "The Golden Globe," with an eye to the use of "said."

It would appear that "said" is used by itself about ninety percent of the time, and it is never modified by an adverb. When said is not used the appropriate verb - whispered, chanted, answered - is substituted, sometimes with appropriate modifiers. It seems like the use of a word other than "said," is used by both authors to indicate that the piece of dialogue is very important and that the reader should pay close attention.

The places IMHO where these two books read best is where no verb is used to indicate dialog. Instead, the piece of dialogue is linked to a person and an action, as follows in this bit from "West With the Night:"

"Can you walk, Kosky, I must follow Buller. He may get killed."

"The Murani smiled without mirth. "Of course, Lakweit! This is nothing - except reward for my foolishness. I will go back to the Singiri and have it attended to. It is best that you lose no time and follow Buller. Already the sun is sinking. Go now, and run quickly."

No "saids" at all. And it reads beautifully.

This implies an extremely complex rule set, but Leonard summed it up nicely.

Alex

Posted February 24, 2004 1:50 PM by Alex Roston

J. Blegaa, fine and good if the Holt Uncensored rules work for you; but I disagree with more of them than I agree with. If you believe what they say, S. J. Perelman and P. G. Wodehouse can't write.

I think Elmore Leonard's rules are excellent, taken collectively rather than as applicable single rules for all occasions; but they're superseded by the great and primordial rule of writing, which says that if it works, it's not wrong, and if it doesn't work, it's not right.

More on this anon. I have a book that needs making.

Posted February 24, 2004 1:58 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

That's good. And a really bad writer doing exactly the same scene would have generated a line something like this:

"Of course, Lakweit!", the Murani smiled mirthlessly.

Posted February 24, 2004 2:01 PM by Simon

Simon, that was wonderful. I'm putting the two phrases together for contrast, printing them out, and taping them to my mirror:

"The Murani smiled without mirth. "Of course, Lakweit! This is nothing - except reward for my foolishness. I will go back to the Singiri and have it attended to. It is best that you lose no time and follow Buller. Already the sun is sinking. Go now, and run quickly."

A really bad writer doing exactly the same scene would have generated a line something like this:

"Of course, Lakweit!", the Murani smiled mirthlessly.

Alex

Posted February 24, 2004 2:27 PM by Alex Roston

Sorry for the above. The italics should have extended down for a few lines more.

Alex

Posted February 24, 2004 2:36 PM by Alex Roston

Hmm. Taking these rules one by one:

1: don't open with weather: it's not specifically weather he's referring to here so much as atmospheric description in general. William Goldman says you can't open a screenplay with a courtroom scene because there's too much going on that needs to be described, and whoever's reading the script will get bored and give up. The trouble is, it's very hard to make an atmospheric description gripping. You really do need to be Mervyn Peake to get away with it, and a lot of people give up on Titus Groan early on because it's just too dense.

2: avoid prologues: errr... "Prologues are just backstory" -- well, yes, but backstory can be extremely important to the main plot, to the extent that revealing it through flashbacks or dialogue or scattered hints can make it unnecessarily hard to figure out what's going on, or can force the writer to shoe-horn backstory into a place where it doesn't fit. Probably too many novels have prologues, but sometimes a prologue is exactly what's needed.

3 & 4: bookisms & Tom Swifties: this should be obvious, but it isn't. "Never" is a bit too strong, but only a little bit.

5: exclamation points: yes, and this also applies to semi-colons. More so if you love run-on sentences.

6: "suddenly": Oy. I agree completely with this, and it's so hard.

7: dialect: Well, Irvine Welsh gets away with it, but he's an exception. And even Trainspotting has long stretches with no significant amounts of dialect.

8 & 9: descriptions of characters and places: Depends. Sometimes detailed descriptions are necessary, or at least desirable; sometimes they're not. (Again, I refer you to Titus Groan. Every character, down to the Grey Scrubbers, the servants whose hereditary task it is to wash the walls of Gormenghast's kitchens before the cooks arrive, is described in microscopic detail. Every room, every corridor, every speck of dust. It makes the book a slow read, but immensely rewarding.) I think Leonard's expressing a preference here, not picking out a universal truth.

And as for rule 10: different people skip different things. Some people skip the battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings; some people skip the poetry; some people skip the scenery descriptions. If he's saying "write what you like to read", that is good advice, and surprisingly un-obvious. (If you can't stand to read it, why should anyone else bother?) But he seems to imply that everyone skips the same bits, which is Just Not True.

I think the Pat Holt Ten Mistakes that j blegaa mentioned is better, though.

Of course all of these lists of rules should include Rule #0: Follow the rules 99% of the time, but ignore them if breaking them allows you to do something wonderful.

Posted February 24, 2004 2:47 PM by Katherine F.

Katherine - What a great run-down. I agree almost entirely, especially about Titus Groan, but please don't make me give up my semi-colons. I love the little things.

Posted February 24, 2004 2:59 PM by Seth Ellis

I agree with them, in principle. I also saw here what I expected to see, which was a host of well read (and attentive readers) pointing out that really good/great writers break the rules all the time.

Take the weather. f'r'instance, I happen to think one of the best opening lines in a book was, "It was a dark and stormy night," because it set the mood, totally, and completely (the next line in the book I have in mind introduces us to the protaganist, and uses the weather to sketch a sense of her, but I digress).

Mind you the book to which I attach it is L'Engles, "Wrinkle in Time," not the vast tome Bulwer-Lytton wrote with the same opening (Snoopy's book, for those who don't know is comprised of bits and pieces of the latter novel).

As for dialect, I will use to Twain to make an amendment: Only use it if you know it, inside and out. "Huckleberry Finn" is great, but I find "The Prince and the Pauper" unreadable. On the other hand, he didn't try for dialect in "A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" and that worked just fine.

Terry

Posted February 24, 2004 3:46 PM by Terry Karney

To Elmore Leonard, I say, "Piffle."

But then, I love Georgette Heyer. And I think I started an Elmore Leonard once and never finished it, but I can't remember. Which should tell you something.

Not only is every reader different, what readers want changes. This list of "rules" is tatamount to this season's list of "What Not To Wear."

But for those afraid of having people snicker and point at them behind their backs, having a list is a comforting thing. To the rest of you, have courage, and write your story the way you think it is best told. It may be those electric blue suede shoes are just the right touch.

Posted February 24, 2004 4:12 PM by Laura Kinsale

Charlie, I don't think I've proven myself cool enough to expect my ideas of cool to match many...nay, anyone's idea of cool.

Frankly, I'm one of the least cool people I know...which at least makes for some interesting schtick.

Posted February 24, 2004 4:15 PM by Skwid

I thought that the key to Elmore Leonard's rules was made clear in many cases:

"If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want."

"There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's ''Sweet Thursday,'' but it's O.K. because ..."

"Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word."

and so on.

In other words, any rule can be broken *IF* you know exactly what you're doing (Corollary: A lot of newish writers, myself included, who think they know exactly what they're doing don't, so it never hurts to at least look over your prose with these rules in mind).

If I took these rules as absolutes, I'd dismiss them all, even the last. If I take them as written, with all their caveats, they make sense.

Posted February 24, 2004 6:01 PM by Lenora Rose

I thought about my "extended" rules for dialogue, and did a little rewriting on my current effort with them in mind. I changed a lot, but I didn't change everything.

It does works better now, however.

Alex

Posted February 24, 2004 6:45 PM by Alex Roston

To paraphrase a writer friend - I'd carry dog poo in my bare hands for miles to write like Atwood.

At this stage, I reckon it's too soon to know if breaking a few of Elmore's rules would help.

Posted February 24, 2004 7:10 PM by Karen Junker

Elmore's rules: Number One (Never start with the weather) reminds me of one of Mark Twain's forwards, where he famously excuses the lack of weather in the entire book. (I then spent much time as a small child, looking for weather, and as it accompanied a compendium of Twain's work, and not only the original book to which it had been attached, I actually found some weather somewhere, and was disappointed and elated at the same time. I think the weather was in Roughing It, but I don't quite remember.)

I too think NEVER is a bit harsh when it comes to never using a word other than said to carry dialogue or when using adverbs. On the other hand, I have read a lot of Anne of Green Gables and The Girl of the Limberlost and find certain parts hard to read without giggling because of the authorial choice in adjectives. For example, the Girl of the Limberlost ejaculates, expostulates, and pants. A LOT. (David Eddings also suffers from "said-isms".) I think the same rule that applies to exclamation points should apply to verbs-other-than-said and adverbs--but with slightly less stringent ratios. Like maybe one every twenty pages. If necessary.

Random question: I have prologue disease...and I'm honestly trying to clear it up. But what do I do if I have necessary information from the viewpoint of a character, who while important to the story, isn't one of the two main view point characters? Also, this period of time happens just before either of those two characters is born. I had considered letting them find the information out through several methods, like reading a journal or talking to the minor character involved, but she's just not a chatty Cathy and she doesn't write anything down, being a paranoid little bugger. I also need to seed the information fairly early on, as it leads to certain other events....so what to do about the prologue? Chop it up, and intersperse it throughout the book? Or make it the first chapter, and suddenly in chapter two, jump to the first of the two main characters? Are there any circumstances where the very concept of a prologue won't make readers skip twenty pages? (As per rule ten.)

Holt's rules: The repeats - Diane Gabaldon is a repeat offender on this one, as she keeps describing Brianna's "blue gaze" or "blue stare" or whatever it was. I just remember that she used it a few times on two different, if related characters. Since the story is related in first person though, would that make it an acceptable usage, as people often give little idiomatic phrases to habits of other people they know well. Perhaps that was the character's own recognition pattern for the other two characters.

Also, if you use a word or derivatives in a differing way...ie...using the noun form or the adjective, or to describe differing things, is it considered resting on a crutch word? While not the most stellar prose in the world, the "abrasion" examples seemed to differ enough that I might not have noticed it twenty pages later. On the same page perhaps or in the same paragraph, perhaps--but not unless it was the exact phrasing, used to describe the same thing as before. (The use of such a word might be deliberate, trying to enforce a particular metaphor.)

Posted February 24, 2004 7:40 PM by PiscusFiche

The master rule for writing is this:

You can do anything at all, provided it works.

Posted February 24, 2004 7:55 PM by James D. Macdonald

I have to admit, I felt for the poor fellow over in
Slushkiller who asked something along the lines of
"How do I tell when it's good enough?" to get hit
with TNH's "It depends." Of course, that's better
than what I felt like saying, which was, "When it
no longer sucks."

I don't mind Ten Rules lists, but I'd feel better if
they were called "Ten Heuristics." If Writing Good
Stuff was just a question of finding a magic recipe,
writing would be an engineering degree. (Cf. Fritz
Leiber's _The Silver Eggheads_, if you can find
a copy.)

Posted February 24, 2004 8:54 PM by Stephan Zielinski

Hooptedoodle.

Pardon me. I just really like that word.

Hooptedoodle. Hooptedoodle. Hooptedoodle.

Okay, continue with whatever it was you were doing.

Posted February 24, 2004 8:55 PM by Mitch Wagner

Stephan -

I wrote that. I hated the answer I got, but I guess its true. There's a really good short story by Raold Dahl about this man who invents a machine that writes novels and short stories. Good writing can't be mass-produced, can't be defined - you just have to write it and if it works it works and if not you have to find something that does works. If it's not bad, it's good, and if it's not good, its bad, and there's no real machine that cn tell you the answer.

Sometimes I think math is a lot simpler than writing.

Posted February 24, 2004 9:00 PM by Adriana

The more I learn about writing, the more parallels I draw with the acting training I got in college. I remember an instructor saying once that there wasn't really a way to teach acting - only a guide to some of the problems and pitfalls that come up when you do it. You get a toolbox of stuff that's potentially useful (and advice on a couple of things that almost always don't work), but figuring out when, or if, you need the right tool is up to you.

So there's no magic formula, no advice you can get that will turn you from mediocre to brilliant, or cure you of a tin ear, or assure you that if you just follow the instructions and Don't Do These Things you will make Art (and a pile of cash). There are no turn-by-turn directions, only maps of inhospitable territory with a few hazards marked out and "Here Be Dragons" scrawled in at the outer edges. And the patchy, unreliable, contradictory accounts of a few of the explorers who have gone before.

I suppose the problem is that almost everyone suffers from "Yes, but when I do it, it will work," and some of them are right.

Posted February 24, 2004 10:13 PM by Dan Layman-Kennedy

As rules for writing go, I particularly like Gene Wolfe's rules in the Turkey City materials. ("Resist the temptation to overexplain. Your readers are smart.")

There's something poignant about Wolfe's name being misspelt throughout that page.

Karen Junker wrote:
To paraphrase a writer friend - I'd carry dog poo in my bare hands for miles to write like Atwood

Does that work?

Posted February 24, 2004 10:20 PM by Christina Schulman

SEARCH FOR: Prologue
REPLACE WITH: Part One

Well, hey, that was an easy fix.

Posted February 24, 2004 10:26 PM by Bruce Arthurs

Briefly, to Adriana: As someone who got her bachelor's in math and has no academic credentials in writing/English/literature, but is by no means a mathematician (as much as she would have liked to be), your comment made me pause. Certainly before I hit 9th grade geometry I would have said almost anything was easier, or at least more fun, than math. Writing came naturally (for some value of "naturally") and math didn't. Years later, having tasted the appetizer to the appetizer of theoretical math, I'm not so sure. If I were of mathematical calibre to (someday) do original research, I'd be doing it; but what little I glimpsed suggests that the creativity and aesthetic sense that go into mathematical creation/proof are ineffably difficult to learn, just as the creativity and aesthetic sense that go into verbal creation are.

Of course, any real mathematicians, let alone mathematician-writers, on this thread will now trounce me. But I can't shake that feeling. I wouldn't sell my soul for better writing, because it's something I know the hard way I can develop in myself. There have been times I'd've honestly sold my soul to be a true mathematician, however, because I'm not at all confident of it.

Okay, now the writers on this thread will hunt me down and flog me with a wet em-dash...

Posted February 24, 2004 11:07 PM by Yoon Ha Lee

Adriana, TNH-- apologies. Nothing like misremembering who wrote what what where to look dumb.

As far as math being easier than writing, or writing easier than math, it's not worth worrying about.
You start saying things like "This blob of marmalade makes a better hammer than this dead fish."
They're two different skills-- although they do have one thing in common, in that there's no way to learn
how to be an insightful mathematician except to try to do it and hope for the best.

(Side note: per Goedel's work, there's no machine that can tell whether a mathematical theorem
is provable or disprovable, either.)

Posted February 24, 2004 11:26 PM by Stephan Zielinski

Hooptedoodle. Hooptedoodle. Hooptedoodle. Hooptedoodle.

Posted February 25, 2004 2:54 AM by Mitch Wagner

For some but not all people, writing is easier than math. For some but not all people, math is easier than writing (especially fiction). For some people in some circumstances, they can switch.

Making any of these generalizations global merely annoys the pig.

Posted February 25, 2004 3:09 AM by Tom Whitmore

Take the weather. f'r'instance, I happen to think one of the best opening lines in a book was, "It was a dark and stormy night," because it set the mood, totally, and completely

And let's not forget "It had begun to snow."

Posted February 25, 2004 3:28 AM by Robert L

"Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters."

Implying weather is, obviously, an entirely different coil of trope.

Posted February 25, 2004 4:19 AM by John M. Ford

"Of course all of these lists of rules should include Rule #0: Follow the rules 99% of the time, but ignore them if breaking them allows you to do something wonderful."

I think this is implied in his comments on Steinbeck. To those who dismiss his advice by listing authors who successfully pursue the opposite approach - reread what he says about Steinbeck.

I just read the TLS comment (see backtrack link) and I think it needs to be observed that these rules represent his personal approach, and his comments on Steinbeck show he does not think people need to follow them slavishly, even if they work for him.

Wow, I never thought I'd type Steinbeck's name four times in one day.

Posted February 25, 2004 5:26 AM by Andrew

> per Goedel's work, there's no machine that can tell whether a mathematical theorem is provable or disprovable, either

That's not exactly correct. In any formal system there's a theorem that can be defined but can't be proved or disproved. That doesn't mean that it can't be done for most theorems.

As for the article, I find the discussion of it as "rules of writing" kind of funny. Elmore Leonard specifically starts with "These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible..." These rules have a very specific purpose -- to make the writer invisible in the story. It'd be interesting to argue whether they serve this purpose well and which writers have broken them and yet remained invisible (I'm not knowledgeable enough to argue this), but arguing about breaking them without regard to invisibility is taking them out of context. (Of course, my own reaction was similar when I read them, but I realised it was because some of the writers I like are deliberately not invisible.)

Posted February 25, 2004 7:43 AM by ET

Gordon Dickson wrote: "Fall through the words into the story."

Which is good advice for writer and readers.But it is ADVICE not a set of rules. I am always leery of rules about writing because the best books and the best writers break these rules all the time. (As Leonard points out.)

And while I don't put myself in that top tier of rule breakers by any stretch, I can think of stories and books in which I have broken every one of Leonard's rules and still written pretty well. (Though I gave up exclamation points after the first fifth of my writing life, and have never had a character grunting a sentence.)

Jane

PS Given the choice between a handful of doggie poo and another Margaret Atwood book, I know which one I would choose. YMMV

Posted February 25, 2004 7:55 AM by jane

I don't think anyone here has yet mentioned the rules George Orwell suggested at the end of his excellent essay "Politics and the English Language" (1946), so I present them here.

... one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.

It has some other nice observations about usage in his time, many of which are still applicable.

And after all that kerfuffle for his Centenary too (Is a Centennial different?) Or was it that everyone was sick of hearing about him after that?
A sad side note. His works are/were available online here in Australia at
http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/index.html
but I believe that with our new "Free Trade Agreement" with the USA extending copyright from 50 years after the author's death to 70 years, that will no longer be legal.

Posted February 25, 2004 9:12 AM by Epacris

The Murani smiled without mirth.

Though I'm with everyone in general on the subject of what makes for good dialogue, this is a strange example, because to me this sentence is terrible: clunky, stilted, perhaps necessary, but nothing to pull out for admiration.

(That's not to say that the whole doesn't work out to be good, but all the discussion of how a bad writer might have messed up this particular lovely bit of writing is blowing my mind, just a bit.)

Posted February 25, 2004 9:34 AM by redfox

Since I would carry the poo to grow up to be Jane Yolen, I would agree that, yes, YMMV.

---L.

Posted February 25, 2004 9:45 AM by LNHammer

The Murani smiled without mirth.

Though I'm with everyone in general on the subject of what makes for good dialogue, this is a strange example, because to me this sentence is terrible: clunky, stilted, perhaps necessary, but nothing to pull out for admiration.

You're right. Taken out of context, it does look clunky. However, it fits perfectly with the descriptions of the Nandi tribesmen through the two preceeding chapters. The book is an incredible example of what can be accomplished with absolutely minimal prose. I'd happily sell my soul to write like her.

I can only suggest reading the book, of which Hemingway said, "...she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer." Here are the first two paragraphs:

"How is it possible to bring order out of memory? I should like to begin patiently, like a weaver at his loom. I should like to say, 'This is the place to start; there can be no other.'

"But there are a hundred places to start for there are a hundred names - Mwanza, Serengetti, Nungwe, Molo, Nakuru. There are easily a hundred names, and I can begin best by choosing one of them - not because it is first nor of any consequence, but because here it happens to be, turned uppermost in my logbook. After all, I am no weaver. Weavers create. This is remembrance - revisitation; and names are keys that open corridors no longer fresh in the mind, but nonetheless familiar in the heart."

What I also find interesting is the number of "mistakes" she made in the first two paragraphs. I see a paragraph that begins with the word "but," two uses of a semicolon on the first page of the manuscript, a non-parenthetical dash, incorrect use of a semicolon in the second paragraph...

The copy in my hand is the thirteenth printing. I think that for this particular book the power of her language and her vision carries the reader through all her "roughness" as a writer.

Alex

Posted February 25, 2004 11:37 AM by Alex Roston

Is there a list anywhere of writers' "crutch" words? For example, Garcia Marquez must use "lucid" at least 15 times per novel, and I don't think it's all the translator's fault.

I read a couple of Robert Asprin's "Myth INC" books, but as soon as I realized that there are literally ten different "said-words" on every page, I was literally unable to read them anymore. What a lot of effort (I imagine him saying "hmm...is Aahz grimacing this response? No, I think he's sighing. Or maybe he's just responding! No, too boring.") to create the appearance of pointless stupidity.

Posted February 25, 2004 11:39 AM by Cryptic Ned

Leonard's #8 rule (don't describe your characters) strikes me as being not such a bad idea, though I sometimes think there should be something to give an idea of what they look like, if not necessarily a straight physical description or a characteristic. That becomes a list, and who needs that? [YMMV, of course.] Maybe just something at the character's introduction, to give the idea, and then not give it again, at least not for a long time (unlike Robert Jordan, who mentions Warders' hard faces and tense stances every chance he gets).

My favorite character description ever is from So Long And Thanks For All The Fish:

"If you took a couple of David Bowies and stuck one of the David Bowies on the top of the other David Bowie, then attached another David Bowie to the end of each of the arms of the upper of the first two David Bowies and wrapped the whole business up in a dirty beach robe you would then have something which didn’t exactly look like John Watson, but which those who knew him would find hauntingly familiar."

Utterly, totally absurd and brilliant.

Posted February 25, 2004 12:55 PM by Adam Lipkin

I will freely tell you that when I receive a submission which begins with a Prologue, I turn over all those pages and begin reading with Chapter One. Later, I'll figure out if the Prologue is necessary.

Sometimes I do this with works under contract as well, but I do it uniformly with submissions. The vast majority of unpublished or little published writers do not write good Prologues. They give away too much of what is to follow or reveal the villain/evil of the work right up front, even if they think they're being cagey; they set the Prologue 100 years ago but don't convincingly write about 100 years ago; whatever is discussed in the prologue doesn't come back into the book until more than halfway through, leaving the reader wondering for 100 pages or so what the writer was talking about; etc.

Reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe out loud to my daughter this week made me painfully aware of another recommendation: long paragraphs should consist of more than one sentence and any sentence during which you must stop for breath more than twice probably needs to be more than one sentence. Unless you're C.S. Lewis, of course, and maybe even then, sometimes . . . .

Posted February 25, 2004 1:15 PM by Melissa Singer

Charlie Stross: your Lemma might, for mathematical precision, be rewritten from

"And, most importantly of all, 'never use ten words where one will do.'"

to

"And, most importantly of all, 'never use ten words where eight will do.'"

Counting words in a sentence, or letters in a word, is something that people tend to do while constructing 666 from the letters of George W. Bush AWOL, or because they've been up 48 hours chugging Open Cola and writing software.

BUT:

my shortest publication ever was a self-referential sentence that Doug Hofstadter ran in Scientific American, and included in his anthology "Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern"
by Douglas R. Hofstadter (Paperback reprint- March 1996):

Yes! It's on page 26. But I forgot my account's password on Amazon, so they can't violate Doug's copyright by showing me my own sentence in his book without my emailing them to ask for a reminder for that password.

Anyone else able to find that super sentence? I vaguely recall him calling it a gem, or masterpiece, or something.

How much can one earn, selling a sentence at a time?

Quite a lot, actually, if that's a 1-sentence Treatment, such as some Guild writers have sold to Hollywood studios!

Darn, now where is my copy? I've got to find it and put it on my Math webpage. It's so easy to misplace a single sentence in a household with roughly 500,000 sheets of paper...

Posted February 25, 2004 1:24 PM by Jonathan Vos Post

Robert L: It had begun to snow.

What's that from?

"The door dilated." A famous Heinlein opening line - except I don't know what work it's from. He uses it in "Friday," but I have a feeling he's echoing something earlier, and more famous. This page attributes the line to "Gulf," while here it's attributed to "Beyond This Horizon." Heinlein seems to have used it a few times.

The line was cited as the perfect science fiction opener, since it is both familiar and strange. To have a door open is perfectly mundane and ordinary, but to have a door dilate, now, that's strange and stfnal! Must be some kind of door that operates like a camera iris, eh?

Later, Isaac Asimov showed how that's twaddle. The best shape for a door is rectangular, unless you're in microgravity, which Heinlein's door wasn't.

There is a rule implied here about the writing of hard sf.

Posted February 25, 2004 1:41 PM by Mitch Wagner

"When you get stuck, don't think about the words. Imagine it better and keep going." (Jack Kerouac, quoted here by Gene Wolfe-with-an-e-dammit at Turkey City)

Now, I don't know whether that would work for everyone, but that's almost a perfect description of how I work. When I get stuck, there are two possibilities: I know what I'm thinking about but I can't find the words; or I don't know what I'm thinking about because I haven't imagined it well enough. Even the first is usually best remedied by imagining the situation differently, so that I can find the words. Focusing on words is a very good way of getting irreversibly stuck.

Posted February 25, 2004 1:47 PM by Katherine Farmar

(Thread drift warning...)

Goedels work has a boatload of implications, one of which being that any finite state machine designed
to prove or disprove theorems in a formal system will be unable to prove some true theorems and
unable to disprove some false theorems. For more than any sane person could want to know about this,
Hofstadtler's _Goedel, Esher, Bach_ beats the point to death.

Posted February 25, 2004 2:25 PM by Stephan Zielinski

Continuing the thread drift, the Hofstadter work made great 12th grade reading other than the fact that all those darn IB exams kept getting in the way of finishing it until after graduation. I make no claims to have understood it. Brilliant book, though, if you're willing to make the time commitment (6 months in my case).

Sanity...who needs sanity.

Posted February 25, 2004 2:55 PM by Yoon Ha Lee

Mitch, "It had begun to snow" was the opening sentence of Mr. Earbrass's novel in The Unstrung Harp. The last line, incidentally, was "It was still snowing."

---L.

Posted February 25, 2004 2:56 PM by LNHammer

My very favorite opening line is "I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong hills."

Alex

Posted February 25, 2004 3:19 PM by Alex Roston

Mitch wrote: "Isaac Asimov showed how [...] The best shape for a door is rectangular, unless you're in microgravity...."

Does anyone know why submarine doors (in movies, anyway) are always ovoid, or at least with rounded corners? I assume it's so you can run a watertight gasket around the perimeter?

Melissa, I can't describe how validated I feel that you skip the prologues in submissions. I've been telling my writers' groups for years that nobody wants to read them.

I especially hate the "excerpt from a historical treatise" prologue that likes to squat in epic fantasy and space opera novels. The fact that C.J. Cherryh did it in _Cyteen_ is no excuse.
When I see one of these in an amateur writer's work, it's an 80% probability that the writer is basing the story on a role-playing game.

PicusFiche, I don't know if this helps, but the prologues I've seen that worked were told in real time; they were scenic and so lacked that ponderous "introductory notes" flavor.

Once--only once--I was forced to put a prologue in a story because it was one of those childhood trauma things. The hero's decision making processes depended upon what had happened back then, and no matter how hard I tried it wouldn't work smoothly into the story in mere conversation --there was too much of it, and the emotional impact too important.

The movie "Knockaround Guys," used a prologue in a similar way for a similar reason, and it worked (although I realize I may be the only person in America who liked that movie).

Posted February 25, 2004 3:53 PM by Holly M.

I feel vaguely guilty: I have an allergy to most prologues, and I do wholeheartedly support Melissa's decision to skip them in most submissions. After all, even George R.R. Martin's new series, whose firsyt book at least got heaping praise, had a prologue that merely annoyed me.

But I also took the first four pages of an opening chapter and split them into a prologue. I then looked at it hard, several times over, and the prologue is now 2 1/2 pages. But I have not yet been able to justify removing it, or reintegrating it into the novel. My publishing record suggests I am not yet one of those who does know what they're doing. (My ego says otherwise, but then, that's the ego's job.)

Does this make me a bad person?

Posted February 25, 2004 5:50 PM by Lenora Rose

The opening and closing line in The Fairy Chessmen (1951), by "Henry Kuttner": `The doorknob opened a blue eye and looked at him.'

That's stuck in my mind's eye for years, even when I've completely forgotten the rest of the story, its name, and the author (who I vaguely remember was the pen name of a pair). But that's not uncommon for me. There are several stories I'm still trying to track down from memories of vivid scenes.
Actually. Does anyone know if a lot of stuff was cut from The Sheep Look Up (John Brunner <ahem>) when it was reprinted? Either there are several bits from my 1960s/70s reading I can't find in the new edition or I'm melding other stories or books into it.

Posted February 25, 2004 9:27 PM by Epacris

Is the prologue problem solved by simply calling the prologue "Chapter 1"? Or is there something deeper at work?

Posted February 25, 2004 9:28 PM by Mitch Wagner

The prologue problem is solved by calling it "Chapter One" or by putting the information elsewhere in the book. Either solution is valid.

(Of course, there are times when a prologue is entirley reasonable and Just Fine. Those times when I've done 'em, for example.)

Posted February 25, 2004 9:40 PM by James D. Macdonald

The SF approach to the "prologue problem" used to be to make it part of chapter 1 but print the whole thing in italics. When I began reading SF (longer ago than I like to admit) I quickly learned that I should not expect a passage in italics at the beginning of a story to make sense, but I should read it anyway because the story would be a different story, not as good, if I didn't have those particular question marks hanging in the air.

All the same, long passages in italics (by which I mean anything more than a third of a page) are hard to read. I'd rather have such a section labeled a prologue and printed in normal type.

I guess what I'm saying is, there's a legitimate artistic purpose to be served by a disconnected passage at the beginning of a story. It can set a mood, pose a conundrum, give a perspective, provide a clue, signal the type of story to come, all as part of the reader contract. It's too bad that a lot of writers don't use this tool well, but that's no reason to skip all prologues. That will only ensure that you miss the instances where the prologue was an essential element.

No use saving it for later -- after you've read the rest of the story, it won't be the same. Of course, a really good writer uses this fact; it is often rewarding to turn back and read the prologue again once you've reached the last page, to see how different it is. (A really, really good writer then sucks you into re-reading the whole story.)

Posted February 26, 2004 12:44 AM by Sylvia Li

Mitch, the prologue problem is not always solvable by calling it Chapter One. If the prologue is significantly disconnected in time, pov character, or tone from the rest of the novel, then calling it Chapter One merely places the reader's discontinuity at the beginning of Chapter Two.

I'm not saying that no one should ever write a prologue, but most beginning/unpublished writers do not know how to write them well, and therefore reading a prologue does not give me, when I am wearing my editor hat, a true sense of the writer's ability.

Good writers can break the rules successfully. Charles Grant's books, especially the Oxrun Station series, nearly all begin with landscape and weather, and he does it evocatively. Quinn Yarbro's Saint-Germain novels include multi-page letters, memoranda, and reports, in italic, between the chapters, often about, from, and to people who don't ever appear in the main body of the book. These add depth and texture to her world-building. In another writer's hands, such epistles would be tedious beyond measure; in Quinn's, they are a treat.

Posted February 26, 2004 9:54 AM by Melissa Singer

PiscusFiche: you can have the minor character tell your POv character. Or you could have them tell someone else with the POV character eavesdropping. Or you could have them drop a mysterious hint and then have either the POV character or someone else torture it out of them. You could have them confess on their deathbed. You could have them confess the essentials on their deathbed and die in the middle such that the priest who breaks the rules to tell the POV character about this weird confession doesn't know everything, and the rest can become clear later. This is the same if it's backstory or a point of view about something or anything at all.

All of these work, and all of these are things with story-nature, by which I mean that they dangle enticing hooks to other things and would be interesting to read, some more than others.

Getting the information across while keeping POV discipline can be hard, and sometimes you just have to face it that this particular piece of information is just going to remain invisible from the pit, no matter how cool it is, because you can't wangle a way of getting it in. But you know, the author is supposed to know more about things. This is a good thing. This helps. So while you can rage about your unchatty minor character and I can curse the obtuseness of my first person narrator who doesn't see whole categories of things, we have to do that on our own time, because knowing things that don't go in is OK as long as it doesn't hurt the story.

Looking at the story from on top so that you know what's essential to go in to set up what you're doing and what you're going to do later is a very useful skill to cultivate.

Posted February 26, 2004 10:11 AM by Jo Walton

I'd say there should be about two rules for writing, and maybe they're guidelines.
1) Enjoy what you do, and
2) Try to get paid for it.

Incidentally, some above conversation reminded me of a demi-joke that was trying to form in my mind as I drove to work the other day. There's two guys at computers, and one says, "Hey, how do you spell 'Hofstadter?'" and the other says "Google Escher, Bach."

Um, then suddenly they slipped on a funny banana peel!!! (I forgot to mention, the one guy was really tall, and it was snowing.)

Posted February 26, 2004 11:03 AM by Kip W

I've always been rather fond of the old "Encyclopedia Galactica" trick, much used in the science fiction of the 1930s-50s, parodied in "Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" in the 1970s, and not much used since.

If you need to do an info-dump, make it into a quote from a fictional reference book. Better still if the reference book is a history book or encyclopedia, describing, from centuries later, the momentous historical events which are the subject of your story.

Both Katharine Kerr and Steven Brust have had fun with this idea recently, pretending that their novels are historical romances written, centuries after the fact, in the fictional worlds they created. Kerr and Brust have both included introductions and afterwords in their novels describing the travails their stuffy, academic historians and translators had in bringing their works to the public.

Norman Spinrad used a variation on this gimmick in "The Iron Dream," a rather heavy-handed sword-and-sorcery epic purporting to be by one Adolf Hitler, a minor figure in German politics in the 1920s who immigrated to the U.S., became active in the new phenomenon of science fiction fandom and publishing, and eventually published a few novels. "The Iron Dream" is the name of a book containing Hitler's novel, "Lords of the Swastika," written in the 1950s, along with foreword and epilogue, supposedly written by college professors, describing the cult following the novel has achieved. Spinrad even created a fictional Also By This Author page, containing the other novels this writer supposedly created, with titles like "Lightning War" and "The Thousand Year Empire."

As I describe "The Iron Dream," it sounds like it's in horrible taste, but I think actually Spinrad manages to pull it off. One of the things he's really doing, of course, is asserting that good people might become monstrously evil in another environment - his fictional Hitler is described as really a good guy, extremely well-loved in sf fandom, a figure like Asimov who achieves great success but never considers himself too much of a bigshot to get his hands dirty with hektograph ink.

Posted February 26, 2004 4:12 PM by Mitch Wagner

Mitch, here's my favorite quote-from-nonexistent-reference:

You'll find peroxide toothpaste very useful. Blood does stain the teeth so, whether it's yours or someone else's.

--Catriona Rua, A Guide For the Newly Embraced, page 144.

But then there's also my email tag:

If you didn't like something the first time, the cud won't be any good either.

--Elsie the Cow, Ruminations, page 14

Posted February 26, 2004 5:52 PM by Xopher

Good ones, Xopher. Did you make up the Elsie the Cow item? And I assume the "Guide for the Newly Embraced" is for vampires? What story or stories is it from?

Posted February 26, 2004 6:36 PM by Mitch Wagner

My first encounter with "encyclopedia galactica" was actually in Jane Yolen's Dragon's Blood, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Then there were the White Jenna books doing storytelling-as-anthropology, weren't they? (I apologize profusely if I'm getting this all wrong; it's been a long time.)

Jack McDevitt's A Talent for War refers to fictional reference works, quite adroitly--or at least, I really really want to read Man and Olympian.

Posted February 26, 2004 7:54 PM by Yoon Ha Lee

Jack McDevitt's A Talent for War refers to fictional reference works, quite adroitly--or at least, I really really want to read Man and Olympian.

The great Jorge Luis Borges used fictional references works all the time in his writing, and I really enjoyed them.

I suspect that fictional references become tedious in the nth book in a series when the author is using them in a lazy, bored, or boring manner just because s/he did it in the first (n-1) books. For excellent examples of how fictional references read after too many books, check out "Parrots of Dune," "Macaws of Dune," or "Lorikeets of Dune" by Peter David and Frank Herbert.

Or better yet, don't.

Maybe the real rule about fictional references is that one shouldn't use them as chapter headings?

Alex

Posted February 26, 2004 10:55 PM by Alex Roston

A little late for relevance, but Jonathan asked, "Anyone else able to find that super sentence? I vaguely recall him calling it a gem, or masterpiece, or something."

Sure enough, page 26 spilling onto 27:

"Several of the real masterpieces sent in belong to what I call the /self-documenting/ category, on which a simple example is Jonathan Post's 'This sentence contains ten words, eighteen syllables, and sixty-four letters."

Certainly fewer would not do.

Posted February 27, 2004 12:02 AM by Mary Messall

Mary Messall:

Thank you for unearthing that gem!

Reminds me of the tale I heard on NPR a few years ago. They interviewed a famous Garbologist. Asked him "What was the most valuable thing you ever found in excavating urban garbage?"

He said that he'd found a diamond. Unfortunately, his cleaning crew accidently re-threw it out from his workshop.

There is a website listing fictional references, giving author, title of actual book, title of imaginary book, and imaginary author of imaginary book.

Do imaginary authors get imaginary rejection letters?

Posted February 27, 2004 10:56 AM by Jonathan Vos Post

Mary Messall:

and thank you again! I've used what you found for me. It's now up near the very top of:

MATH Pages of Jonathan Vos Post

since it is, technically, one of my first published works of Mathematics.

On an earlier thread I mentioned the concept of the LPU: the Least Publishable Unit. The journal Science (or was it Nature?) had an article about how the average scientific paper published was becoming shorter, and had more coauthors. They speculated that evolution was driving towards the LPU. An LPU can still be cited in the footnotes of other papers, included on one's curriculum vitae, and help in the "publish or perish" treadmill.

Next issue, a letter to the editor asked (I paraphrase slightly due to deteriorating memory):

"Is a letter to the editor a LPU? p.s., if this letter is too long, I can make it shorter."

There is a tradition in Science Fiction of the LPU, also.

Most cited, Fredric Brown's (I hope):
"The last man on Earth sat alone in his room. There was a knock at the door."

Then other writers started making even shorter works. Forry Ackerman still boasts of his 1-letter LPU...

Posted February 27, 2004 11:25 AM by Jonathan Vos Post

Mitch: they're both mine. And yes, the "Embrace" is the process by which a human is turned into a vampire...Catriona Rua is famous for mentoring these folks. Allegedly.

I haven't used the reference in a story - yet. Catriona herself appears in my story Catriona, which is legally unpublishable (as Our Hostess puts it) in its current form, and probably infinitely rejectable even if I file off the serial numbers. Stream of consciousness writing, even if intermittent, doesn't tend to appear in the magazines, even if it's really really good, and I have no idea if my story is or not.

Statistically, probably not.

Posted February 27, 2004 11:29 AM by Xopher

Why is "Catriona" legally unpublishable?

Posted February 27, 2004 12:17 PM by Mitch Wagner

It's got too much specific Rein-Hagen stuff in it. It's on the border of fanfic. Fortunately, that's also the most tedious bit, and "filing off the serial numbers" will also make it a better story. The only thing I don't think I can get rid of is the word 'embrace' itself, which may not even be original with Rein-Hagen.

(Rein-Hagen is the author of Vampires: The Masquerade, which is an FRP that got made into a TV series called Kindred: The Embraced. I don't use any of the specific characters from either, but the origins show. It will probably be obvious even without the "serial numbers," but I think I can get it to where it doesn't actually violate his copyrights.)

Posted February 27, 2004 1:33 PM by Xopher

Jonathan: on Safari, the window-top page-title for your mathpage shows up as "Pi: MATH Pgaes of Jonathan Vos Post." (Don't know how to type pi-the-Greek-letter offhand...sorry.) FYI.

Posted February 27, 2004 3:24 PM by Yoon Ha Lee

I try to remind myself of the Primordial Rule on a regular basis, and have been trying to teach myself where the line between "works" and "don't work" is by re-reading my book as if I were a reader and not a writer (as Teresa might put it "with my reader mind"), and saying, "If this were someone else's book, how would I feel about it?"

This is a very, very difficult trick, but I highly recommend trying it.

I pulled out nearly half a chapter during my second revision pass becase of this, because I almost got bored. I discovered that my characters shrug so often that it's amazing they have not developed permanent hunches, and tried to tone it down somewhat (although considering that they spend a lot of the book in a state of perplexity, there was a certain amount that was inevitable). There were some other things that came up, but those two stuck with me.

Anyhow. I always treat "rules" as "guidelines", with the sole exception of basic grammar rules.

Dialogue tags are one of the things I disagree on. I think 'replied', 'answered', 'commented' and 'asked' are all nearly as invisible as 'said', and work just as well. I also think that 'muttered' or 'murmured' (and, of course 'whispered') are all perfectly valid tags, provided they're accurate when invoked. I even have been known to use other tags. There are, of course, ridiculous dialogue tags.... but not every dialogue tag is ridiculous.

Xopher: 99% of White Wolf is taken from other sources originally, so I'm not sure it matters how much you steal from them.

But I'm not still pissed about their suit against Sony for Underworld or anything.

Posted February 27, 2004 5:20 PM by Tina

...provided they're accurate... Yes, I'd say "'DON'T YOU EVER DO THAT AGAIN!!!!' he murmered" would be pretty bad... :-)

Interesting point about White Wolf...maybe I'll look at R-H's bibliography and see if I can find an earlier source for 'embrace' as the vampirification process. Still probably not a publishable story for reasons of quality, but worth knowing.

I hadn't heard about their suit. I should rent that movie.

Posted February 27, 2004 5:48 PM by Xopher

Do save yourself the four dollars, Xopher. As far as myself and everyone else subjected to the movie at the time was concerned, it was an unnecessary gore fest, with all the best parts shown already in the previews.

However, if you have other reasons to see it, such as a fascination with close-up shots of beating hearts - or really, any reason other than to check whether it's REALLY plagiarism - by all means, give it a rent.

Just don't say I didn't warn you.

Posted February 27, 2004 6:55 PM by Alice Keezer

For the opposite view... I haven't seen it yet, but a friend of mine, who most emphatically is not normally terribly into dark/gothy horror movies, highly recommended it, and the friends who are into such things mostly liked it as well.

Granted, greencine might be a better choice than Blockbuster, but then, when isn't that true?

Posted February 27, 2004 7:13 PM by Tina

Mitch Wagner Sayeth:

>Later, Isaac Asimov showed how that's twaddle. The best shape for a door is rectangular, unless you're in microgravity, which Heinlein's door wasn't.

>There is a rule implied here about the writing of hard sf.

Well, it's probably not the one Heinlein had in mind, but...

...the rule is that humans don't always, or even usually, design things in the best way.

If a door was dilating in one of my stories, it would be because the politician who commissioned the building was trying to make a statement about being prepared for the future, or because the architect was trying to win an award for originality. It would cause plenty of problems, and the people who worked in the building would complain about it to each other constantly. Eventually, however, they would end up being sort of fond of the awkward thing, and defend its utility to any outsider who dared say that it was, maybe, not the best possible design.

In my world-building notes, the phrase that comes up most often is "The logic goes something like this..." When I talk with friends who've seen my background, that phrase alone is enough to indicate that I think someone's actions are A) well thought-out, and B) stupid.

Posted February 27, 2004 7:17 PM by Ashni

In passing, architectural notes: technically, a sliding door also dilates; if I wanted to make a reference to an iris, I'd just curve the sliding edges. IIRC, iris forms are used in solar energy technologies--very high tech shades in conjunction with glass walls.

Posted February 27, 2004 8:09 PM by Randolph Fritz

Holly M, if no one has answered, I believe it's easier to make a seal on an ovoid or round form. I do know (from an hidden past as a Tupperware Lady) that the round or oval seals ALWAYS make a water and air-tight seal, and can be put in a cooler with ice safely, the square or rectangular ones are okay with keeping air out, but water CAN get in.

I would think that anti pressure seals would be better in rounded forms. Corners can make inconvenient gaps....

my 2¢, ymmv.

Posted February 27, 2004 10:29 PM by Paula Helm Murray

I've noticed the domain hooptedoodle.com is available, and it's been a continual effort to talk myself out of registering it.

Posted February 28, 2004 3:35 PM by Mitch Wagner

Mitch: Why would you want to talk youself out of that? It sounds perfectly delightful. Maybe I should rename my blog hooptedoodle. Or use it as a regular heading withing my blog for the frivolous stuff. Hmm...

I'm currently sitting in a panel on intentional communities (at Potlatch) and I think hooptedoodle.com would be a great place to start a community. Of course, I want you to do it.

MKK

Posted February 28, 2004 4:27 PM by Mary Kay

Mitch--
As I describe "The Iron Dream," it sounds like it's in horrible taste, but I think actually Spinrad manages to pull it off. One of the things he's really doing, of course, is asserting that good people might become monstrously evil in another environment - his fictional Hitler is described as really a good guy, extremely well-loved in sf fandom, a figure like Asimov who achieves great success but never considers himself too much of a bigshot to get his hands dirty with hektograph ink.

You read it and I haven't, but as you've described it, I have to say it sounds like it's in horrible taste because it is in horrible taste. It's one thing to assert that a blameless or even exemplary person in real life is, in a fictional dimension, a mass murderer, and another thing to assert the reverse. Hitler's victims weren't fictional, nor were they consenting players in Hitler's story. They were real. They were living their own lives, they were their own and belonged to themselves, not to Hitler (or the author), when he used the power of the state to have them tortured and killed.

I think that one can get away with that if the perpetrator-cum-fictional-saint is Nero or Caligula, but at the moment there are still a number of living people who can point to empty places at their table, and then point to Hitler as the architect of their loss. The difference between good taste and bad often lies in no more than knowing when it's okay to speculate out loud and in public about such things, and in this case, I don't think that particular 'when' is yet now.

Though I think you should at least register 'hooptedoodle.org'.

Posted February 29, 2004 3:18 AM by pericat

Disagree strongly. Was sickened by cynical use of beat-up fuss about poster on similar theme for last year's Adelaide Festival to excuse a sponsor in financial trouble to pull out.

Is old platitude, truism, esp in "speculative fiction", to speculate how things might have turned out if one particular person or event had happened differently. Have heard, eg, if Hitler killed in WW I, etc, etc.

Background of The Iron Dream is world in which Holocaust (as it's now called) and other WWII events haven't happened. The prologue <ahem> takes this for granted & is written as introduction presenting this as controversial 'lost' science fiction story by now-dead author. In it you see his obsessions & ideas, and his vision of how World War II would have gone. You can also see how it wouldn't (and didn't) work.
Reminds us how we can live around people without knowing what they might be capable of given the right circumstances (& perhaps wonder what we might do set in different situations ourselves).

Fictional editor I think (been a decade+ since read) says that of course civilized people couldn't possibly do some of the things he writes. Perhaps is partly a warning that we shouldn't forget & become smug that our society couldn't deteriorate.
From memory Hitler's described as a bit eccentric, with some odd opinions <no one anyone knows, then> and not a first-class writer but a well-known personality in the genre.

It must be part of being a thinking human being that we can allow ourselves to consider these sorts of subjects, not just react in a blind unreasoning way. That is just the reaction that demagogues & dictators & propagandists want to get by 'pushing buttons' - look at the Disinformation discussion about a button-pushing piece that tries to distract & dirty the debate. Especial function of sf. Nurses can't care without controlling both disgust & compassion.

owowow - hand still exciting colours, textures, but can't let pass after last year's example & evolving bigger debate. Paracetamol; bed.

Posted February 29, 2004 9:24 AM by Epacris

Tersesa, Thank you for a very interesting topic. Although, I think, most of the questions have been answered here, I have one more on the topic of writing, it's very simple but something I am unsure of. When writing a novel, do contractions annoy an editor? Should we, in text, write out he had instead he'd, or is it acceptable nowadays to write couldn't, shouldn't etc.?

Posted February 29, 2004 3:33 PM by S. E. Curnow

Epacris: Reminds us how we can live around people without knowing what they might be capable of given the right circumstances (& perhaps wonder what we might do set in different situations ourselves).

Thank you for saying what I wanted to say when I read that comment.

I remember when I was a kid, studying World War II in school, and a friend of the family helped me with a paper. She went through striking out all the places where I'd written things like "monster" or "inhuman," telling me, angrily, that hatred and fear are all too human. That the only exceptional thing about Hitler was that he managed to act on his beliefs, and we needed to keep our eyes open for when somebody like that came into power again.

This was a woman who was permanently scarred from her time in Dachau. She would have thought a book like The Iron Dream above an important reminder.

And oh, yes, of course my teacher thought my paper was inappropriate. Everybody knows Hitler was a monster and that a real human being would never conceive of genocide.

Posted February 29, 2004 4:28 PM by Ayse Sercan

I remember when I was a kid, studying World War II in school, and a friend of the family helped me with a paper. She went through striking out all the places where I'd written things like "monster" or "inhuman," telling me, angrily, that hatred and fear are all too human. That the only exceptional thing about Hitler was that he managed to act on his beliefs, and we needed to keep our eyes open for when somebody like that came into power again.

But did she then suggest you write in that he was a wonderful guy, beloved by all who knew him? That's what I understood to be the Hitler of The Iron Dream from Mitch's description, which may well be my faulty interpretation. I'm sorry, I think that level of revisionism for so recent an historical personage to be in poor taste.

Posted February 29, 2004 5:42 PM by pericat

But did she then suggest you write in that he was a wonderful guy, beloved by all who knew him? That's what I understood to be the Hitler of The Iron Dream from Mitch's description, which may well be my faulty interpretation. I'm sorry, I think that level of revisionism for so recent an historical personage to be in poor taste.

I am given to understand that The Iron Dream is a novel based in an alternate universe, not a piece of historical documentation, so saying it's revisionism isn't really fair. I don't think anybody suggested that the author believed what he wrote was the truth. And people did like Hitler, even in this universe. Some even loved him, and found him likable. How odd to suggest that nobody liked him. Didn't all that badness happen because too many people liked him?

To answer the question, she insisted that I write about how he was a human being, and that any human in his position was capable of coming up with the same sort of idealogy. She wanted me to talk about how Hitler was a product not of some awful mutation, but of his time. How hate is part of the human condition, and the development of a moral sense is critical because we will always have to oppose hate. With Hitler gone, we are not free to relax and think all is well and it will never happen again.

Bear in mind that this is somebody who was betrayed by a neighbor. She knew very well that it was not Hitler alone who made the Holocaust happen. Hitler didn't go from house to house rounding up jews, gypsies, gays, and other undesirables all by himself while all of Europe tried to stop him. Ordinary, likable people, the sort of people who tell really funny stories, or who come and sit with a sick friend in the hospital, those people can also be a part of a horror.

Posted February 29, 2004 6:55 PM by Ayse Sercan

Pericat - Dod I say the Hitler in "The Iron Dream" was a wonderful guy, beloved by everyone who knew him? Perhaps I did, and if I did, I may have overstated the case. The Hitler in "The Iron Dream" was extremely well liked in sf fandom, and there's no evidence presented in the novel that this popularity was undeserved.

Spinrad is arguing for the plasticity of the human condition. Put a person in one circumstance, and he becomes the reviled symbol of evil, the most hated and feared person in the 20th Century. Put him in another circumstance and he's a harmless eccentric, liked by his neighbors. As Alyse alludes to, the difference between the good guy and bad guy isn't innate, it's a matter of the choices we make.

But Spinrad is doing more than that: he's pointing the finger of accusation at Americans in general, and at sf fans in particular. They're the ones who - in his fictional universe - have made "Lords of the Swastika" a classic.

Also: What Alyse said.

Posted February 29, 2004 8:36 PM by Mitch Wagner

Ayse: I am given to understand that The Iron Dream is a novel based in an alternate universe, not a piece of historical documentation, so saying it's revisionism isn't really fair.