The I'm Writing Thread.... Celebrate your pages written etc

[gatordave96]

Thanks for the insight.  Damned if I do, and damned if I don't, it appears. 

I guess I'm just going to let the story write itself.  It's hard enough finishing the damn thing . . . without worrying about being a preachy panda pusher . . . or a techno-sloth apologist.  Not that there's anything wrong with either, as Seinfeld would say.

Cheers.

[Paynesgrey]

Good luck with it!  And keep us posted on how things go.  Write the story in the way that satisfies you, because we can never, ever, satisfy everyone.  But a story you're proud to complete and share with others is something to treasure.

And the Haters?

Don't let their baggage be your problem.  Jim, and most every other author I've read who had tips on writing all share one bit of advice... "have a thick skin."  Be prepared for them, keep in perspective that most every asshole in the world has a keyboard and an opinion that leaves them thinking they know how to tell your story than you do. 

You mine criticism for valid input in terms of storytelling, character development, plot, pacing, dialogue and suchlike... but really only focus on improving your storytelling and not worrying if you're satisfying every Entitlement Baby out there, or every assclown who is just looking to harsh on something to make themselves look smarter.

And, like everything else I say (when I'm not in Junior Moderaptor Mode, anyway) remember mileage very, because I'm just another asshole with a keyboard myself from where someone else might be sitting.   

[Snowleopard]

The way to look at a critique is: Is the writer trying to pump themselves up or
give you advice/make you better.  If the latter then good - if the former - well, there
are still people with outhouses around.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

If we micro-parse any conflict, it can eventually be considered "political." 

Agreed entirely.  Everything is political, even the personal.  I'm not seeing any way for it not to be - outside of writing SF about a species for which the whole notion of factionalism doesn't parse, I have one of those pencilled in for a small role later on. Humans scare them.

Unambitious to not try to engage with this or that faction?  Personally, I'm interested in telling a story, building a world, and developing characters which will be engaging to people of opposing sociopolitical viewpoints, and to do so without relying on sociopolitical issues.

I am finding it as hard to imagine a story that does not somewhere, at some level, connect to some sociopolitical issues, as one about human beings that doesn't have, say, emotions in it.

They're too often merely a marketing crutch, a cheap marketing checklist.

Possibly you're looking at a very different section of the genre from what I read, then, because I can think of very few things I've read in the past several years that struck me that way.  (R.M. Meluch's Tour of the Merrimack books, maybe; or at least, for something supposedly set that far in the future, it breaks my suspension of disbelief that there will be a US so much like the contemporary US and issues so much like contemporary issues - if it doesn't match fifty or a hundred years ago I do not believe it will match four hundred years' time.)

So I want to create an engaging story without pandering to any faction, without relying on being just another source of external validation for their views.

Right with you on that one.  I would be surprised, and probably more disquieted than pleased, to find there was any faction out there that actually shared the views that my central characters hold and that I am interested in exploring.  (Which do not overlap entirely with my own views at all.)

It's easy to entertain someone you agree with, I want to entertain both people I agree, and disagree with. 

I'm not seeing where "agree with" has any relevance here, though.  I mean, in the recent past, I've been rereading Daniel Keys Moran's Tales of the Continuing Time, which are books where I disagree philosophically, politically, and largely aesthetically with pretty much every character who is intended to be sympathetic, and find the antagonists much more to my taste, and I enjoy them immensely; and at the same time have read and been a bit bemused by some Christopher Brookmyre satirical mysteries, in which I agree almost entirely with his supposedly sympathetic characters and the overall effect waves back and forth between somewhat guilty pleasure and "dude, you're waving your id around in public and it;'s enough like mine that you;re making me wince from embarrassment."

One of the things I admire about Heinlein is his ability to convincingly get into and really explore the old-style conservatism of Starship Troopers, the right-libertarianism of Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and the hippie groovitude of Stranger in a Strange Land - I don't think there's any plausible way of deriving Heinlein's actual beliefs from those three texts alone, and the ability to that is one I admire.  Not many people can do that - Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution books are the only recent example I can think of on a similar scale - but it's definitely a thing I aspire to.

And at the end of the day?  Neither communityis entirely right or wrong, with good and noble people on both sides, as well as both sides having a few terrifying fiends.

I'm not seeing how "both sides of this conflict have good people and both have fiends" isn't itself a political position on the conflict in question.

Take 1984.  Long held up as a cautionary tale denouncing socilism, communism, marxism, and likely a good number of other isms...  but George Orwell was in actuality a devout socialist/anarchist who was attacking totolitarianism. 

Indeed, and he also thought the book was a comedy, in the Swiftian satire direction. Lots of people seem not to get that.

That's if you don't know about Proto-Bamboo which not only nourishes them, but gives them the Mind Power to fend off the Nether-Koalas and their Anti-Eucolpytus Space Drives.

Your caps remind me of Flash Gordon.  I've nothing against the existence of good stories that people enjoy that hang together at a Flash Gordon level of realism; as a reader they're for the most part not my thing, and as a writer, I'm a mildly obsessive-compulsive professional molecular biologist; for me personally, making it work only at the Flash Gordon level isn't enough, and I see no reason why I can't make  a story be exciting and have the virtues of a Flash Gordon story, while also having aliens whose entire evolutionary history makes plausible, rational sense if you care to poke at it.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

I always thought Monty Python was brilliant for using the killer rabbit in "The Holy Grail."  Pandas, sloths, banana slugs, whatever.  All good.

If you give me spacefaring banana slugs, I am going to look for the older species that set them up, I am afraid.

I like some of the stories where the good guys wear white, but not so much as those with varying shades of gray.

Oh, agreed entirely.  Though people are really awfully willing to trust that a first-person protagonist is meant to be sympathetic, pretty much no matter how grey you make them.

If anything, the theme would be that too much of any one thing can be dangerous, even organized labor when it results in hegemony.

Possibly it's unduly Canadian of me, but I am not at all convinced hegemony has to be a bad thing; semi-posthuman imperialist Space Canadians fighting crime may be not to some readers' tastes, but at least it won't be bland.

[Quantus]

Oh, agreed entirely.  Though people are really awfully willing to trust that a first-person protagonist is meant to be sympathetic, pretty much no matter how grey you make them.

Im curious how you could make a first person protagonist completely unsympathetic.  Isnt that sort of the key to drawing readers in?  Im not saying that one couldnt be about as Black as they come, but to be devoid of anything the reader could identify with seems like it would make it especially difficult to draw the in, especially in a first person perspective. 

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

Im curious how you could make a first person protagonist completely unsympathetic.  Isnt that sort of the key to drawing readers in?

"Interesting" is not the same thing as "sympathetic" is not the same thing as "can identify with".

The examples I am thinking of, here, are first-person psychopaths/serial killers.  I hope not everybody who read American Psycho was finding Patrick Bateman sympathetic, at any rate.  My personal favourite first-person-deranged is Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, which I must have read half a dozen times in twenty years, and I'd certainly not call Frank Cauldhame sympathetic - brilliantly fascinating, but not a person I'd wish to identify with at all.  (What Banks does with the serial-killer POV second-person bits in Complicity is even nastier for getting under one's skin, but that's kind of stunt writing, not really a technique with much use outside that precise context.)

[Quantus]

"Interesting" is not the same thing as "sympathetic" is not the same thing as "can identify with".

The examples I am thinking of, here, are first-person psychopaths/serial killers.  I hope not everybody who read American Psycho was finding Patrick Bateman sympathetic, at any rate.  My personal favourite first-person-deranged is Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, which I must have read half a dozen times in twenty years, and I'd certainly not call Frank Cauldhame sympathetic - brilliantly fascinating, but not a person I'd wish to identify with at all.  (What Banks does with the serial-killer POV second-person bits in Complicity is even nastier for getting under one's skin, but that's kind of stunt writing, not really a technique with much use outside that precise context.)

OK, I can see what you are saying; I was thinking of Protagonist in the classic use of the term, where it is specifically the character the audience is supposed to identify with most, as opposed to simply the Focal Character.  The closest thing I have read to those is one of the Dexter novels, and while that guy is a clear anti-hero and psychopath, he does have a few redeeming qualities.

[Paynesgrey]

Agreed entirely.  Everything is political, even the personal.  I'm not seeing any way for it not to be - outside of writing SF about a species for which the whole notion of factionalism doesn't parse, I have one of those pencilled in for a small role later on. Humans scare them.

I am finding it as hard to imagine a story that does not somewhere, at some level, connect to some sociopolitical issues, as one about human beings that doesn't have, say, emotions in it.

This would be where the microparsing comes in.  If there is a "theme", it would be regarding things like personal and familial loyalty, the difference between a "community" and "a bunch of people living in the same place."  Looking at the long-term (over decades and centuries) good versus the immediate goals of this or that ambitious person or group, and finally perhaps the potential value of both inter- and intra-community cooperation... 

Broad "Values" which both factions in today's socio-political blocs claim ownership of. 

But in terms of specific issues or causes that people to day, or in the past century, have gone out and picketed or protested in reference to, nada.
Some readers will equate the community that wants the other community's stuff as being a reference to socialists/collectivists, others will look at them as corporate imperialists.

I generally avoid the trope trappings and buzzwords both factions like to bandy about because I'm not keen on cleanly labeling anything and certainly don't want readers to say "Oh, this is about Gitmo/bank bailouts/Israel/unions/domestic surveillance/The Church/etc"  (And in my setting, most of those things are irrelevant anyway, but that won't stop some people from trying.

What would be accurate will be the rare bird who says "Oh, this bit reminds me of the Second Boer War, but that other bit's kind of like the Medici's, and hey, this guy's read his Thucydides..."

Possibly you're looking at a very different section of the genre from what I read, then, because I can think of very few things I've read in the past several years that struck me that way.  (R.M. Meluch's Tour of the Merrimack books, maybe; or at least, for something supposedly set that far in the future, it breaks my suspension of disbelief that there will be a US so much like the contemporary US and issues so much like contemporary issues - if it doesn't match fifty or a hundred years ago I do not believe it will match four hundred years' time.)

Well, my story's set on a colony world left isolated for a thousand or so years, following a huge interstellar war which shattered various empires and polities. Which itself came a couple thousand years after "The Fall of Terra."  So any current socio-political events, nationality or ethnic issues, etc are pretty much irrelevant in there setting.  Root causes, things that are persistent to human nature like "I want your stuff" crop up, and these people have pretty good historical records, but I've been careful to evolve the various communities in ways which were realistic given the setting without mimicking anything. 

The fun thing is that I didn't create that setting with the intention of avoiding current political events.  The story concept, main character & her community came first, and the period of time between then and now kept growing as I created the history necessary to put her where she is.  A lot of  "No, it would take at least this long for the planets's albedo to return to normal, that long for pioneering species to take root in this area again..."

Right with you on that one.  I would be surprised, and probably more disquieted than pleased, to find there was any faction out there that actually shared the views that my central characters hold and that I am interested in exploring.  (Which do not overlap entirely with my own views at all.)

I'm not seeing where "agree with" has any relevance here, though.  I mean, in the recent past, I've been rereading Daniel Keys Moran's Tales of the Continuing Time, which are books where I disagree philosophically, politically, and largely aesthetically with pretty much every character who is intended to be sympathetic, and find the antagonists much more to my taste, and I enjoy them immensely; and at the same time have read and been a bit bemused by some Christopher Brookmyre satirical mysteries, in which I agree almost entirely with his supposedly sympathetic characters and the overall effect waves back and forth between somewhat guilty pleasure and "dude, you're waving your id around in public and it;'s enough like mine that you;re making me wince from embarrassment."

One of the things I admire about Heinlein is his ability to convincingly get into and really explore the old-style conservatism of Starship Troopers, the right-libertarianism of Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and the hippie groovitude of Stranger in a Strange Land - I don't think there's any plausible way of deriving Heinlein's actual beliefs from those three texts alone, and the ability to that is one I admire.  Not many people can do that - Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution books are the only recent example I can think of on a similar scale - but it's definitely a thing I aspire to.

To clarify, I'm talking specifically about writing to this or that cause, for or against this or that issue, etc.  And in particular when it's being done purely to chase the market trends.

Take Avatar:  "Do we have enough People of Color portrayed positively?  Have we portrayed the corporate and military characters in a negative enough fashion?  Do we have Strong Independent Female characters in the proper ratio compared to the number of Sensitive Enlightened Male Characters?  Have we made the proper Statements regarding ecology, sexuality, and economics?  Oh, wait, we'll make the main character handi-capable too, but he'll get better... what are we missing?  Oh, shit, somebody write in a "War on Terror" and "Detainee" reference!"

I'm just waiting for someone to say "Well, that dialogue isn't appropriate or accurate, a Person of Color, particularly a female, wouldn't speak that way..."  As if in 4,000 plus years, after the rise and fall of a planetary, then interstellar, then another interstellar civilization, people will even be speaking "English," much less worried about anything beyond whether or not the hydroponics are going to fail and leave them hungry before spring.

I'm not seeing how "both sides of this conflict have good people and both have fiends" isn't itself a political position on the conflict in question.

Indeed, and he also thought the book was a comedy, in the Swiftian satire direction. Lots of people seem not to get that.

Again, we have to parse to a finer level then those issues which we'd call  "political" in terms of "Current Events" for the past century or so.  The odd parallel to a historic event here or there, simply because some events are bound to repeat when Community A wants something from Community B, whether it's oil, silver, peat, spiced, olives, or jum-jum berries. 

Your caps remind me of Flash Gordon.  I've nothing against the existence of good stories that people enjoy that hang together at a Flash Gordon level of realism; as a reader they're for the most part not my thing, and as a writer, I'm a mildly obsessive-compulsive professional molecular biologist; for me personally, making it work only at the Flash Gordon level isn't enough, and I see no reason why I can't make  a story be exciting and have the virtues of a Flash Gordon story, while also having aliens whose entire evolutionary history makes plausible, rational sense if you care to poke at it.

Oh, the Space Pandas are just there to provide an example of how some people will try to read socio-political statements into a soup label or the tag on a mattress.  Or attempt to school the author of even such a silly space opera in their "responsibility" to address current social issues.

My actual story has fairly hard science, at least on the ground.  The space-opera exceptions being limited to B-5 style hyperspace travel, the existence of "artificial gravity"  (or call it "Mass Field Enhancement or some-such if you want to be picky"), and the means of keeping your crew from turning to paste on the bulkhead during maneuvers.  Plus, I have a species with lifespans in the thousands of years and non-hemoglobin based blood.  Which I suppose might be feasible, but until I can find some more speculative science regarding that bit of speculative biology, I'm calling it "space opera.")

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

OK, I can see what you are saying; I was thinking of Protagonist in the classic use of the term, where it is specifically the character the audience is supposed to identify with most, as opposed to simply the Focal Character. 

Indeed; it's been a while, but I am not recalling anyone in American Psycho I could readily see identifying with.  (One of the nicer bits in Complicity is a serial-killer-with-nailgun scene that's specifically and rather wittily critiquing the unrealism of the serial killer's use of a nailgun in American Psycho.)

The closest thing I have read to those is one of the Dexter novels, and while that guy is a clear anti-hero and psychopath, he does have a few redeeming qualities.

I have read all of those, and I still can't for the life of me figure out whether he's actually meant to be smart and charming and isn't working as that for me, or whether Jeff Lindsay means him to read as someone who thinks he's smart and charming but isn't, really, and just happens to be largely surrounded by idiots.  They would be an example of a series that intrigue me very much at a technical writing level without having any characters to whom i feel the tiniest bit of emotional connection.

(Maybe I'm just vast and cool and unsympathetic. I could live with that.)

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

This would be where the microparsing comes in.  If there is a "theme", it would be regarding things like personal and familial loyalty, the difference between a "community" and "a bunch of people living in the same place."  Looking at the long-term (over decades and centuries) good versus the immediate goals of this or that ambitious person or group, and finally perhaps the potential value of both inter- and intra-community cooperation... 

All of which sounds fascinating, worth exploring, and I am sorry if I misread what you were saying earlier; those are things I'd construe as inherently political issues, regardless of what if any position you or your text or your characters take on them.

What would be accurate will be the rare bird who says "Oh, this bit reminds me of the Second Boer War, but that other bit's kind of like the Medici's, and hey, this guy's read his Thucydides..."

heh.  I'd be deeply surprised if anyone dug out the deeper influences on what I'm doing, either; a politically naive protagonist with simplistic notions of where she comes from and what she's doing may not help there, as she kind of wears them on her sleeve, and getting the more-complicated-than-that nature across despite her is being fun.

Well, my story's set on a colony world left isolated for a thousand or so years, following a huge interstellar war which shattered various empires and polities. Which itself came a couple thousand years after "The Fall of Terra."  So any current socio-political events, nationality or ethnic issues, etc are pretty much irrelevant in there setting. 

Sure, and I'd be surprised if it were otherwise; not sure I can think of any definable political issue that has endured over millennia with the possible exception of anti-Semitism.  I'd find it hard to believe in a human society that didn't have some internal fracture lines of that sort, though - one thing that does intrigue me is the contrast between the Protestant/Catholic divide I grew up with in Ireland and the Anglophone/Francophone distinction I currently live with in Montreal, as ways for ethnic distinctions to be significant go, and talking from either of those is very challenging indeed.  Very little SF engages with issues like that in ways that really feel like distinct things of their own rather than metaphors for some historical model - John Barnes' Earth Made of Glass strikes me as an impressive exception, fwiw.  My setting has relatively recently got hold of a functional anti-aging hack, and the tensions between the people who are going for this and the people who'd rather have children are going to be an issue.

The fun thing is that I didn't create that setting with the intention of avoiding current political events.  The story concept, main character & her community came first, and the period of time between then and now kept growing as I created the history necessary to put her where she is.  A lot of  "No, it would take at least this long for the planets's albedo to return to normal, that long for pioneering species to take root in this area again..."

Which is exactly the scale of world-building that makes something solid, for me.

I'm just waiting for someone to say "Well, that dialogue isn't appropriate or accurate, a Person of Color, particularly a female, wouldn't speak that way..."  As if in 4,000 plus years, after the rise and fall of a planetary, then interstellar, then another interstellar civilization, people will even be speaking "English," much less worried about anything beyond whether or not the hydroponics are going to fail and leave them hungry before spring.

Indeed; I've seen similar grumbling about Ben Aaronovitch's urban fantasy set in London, which sfaict from experience of living on the outskirts of London for four years, is a pretty accurate (and very positive) portrayal of people of mixed-racial descent in a complex context that does not work the same way as North American models.

Oh, the Space Pandas are just there to provide an example of how some people will try to read socio-political statements into a soup label or the tag on a mattress.  Or attempt to school the author of even such a silly space opera in their "responsibility" to address current social issues.

And while I agree with you about that being inappropriate, I do worry that, as someone who is writing with the hope of selling in the US, as the biggest English-language SF market available, that not having lived in the US from more than a few months myself, there might be places where the underlying axioms I may not even be aware of will bounce oddly for a US readership (as seems to have been the case for the Aaronovitch series.)

My actual story has fairly hard science, at least on the ground.  The space-opera exceptions being limited to B-5 style hyperspace travel, the existence of "artificial gravity"  (or call it "Mass Field Enhancement or some-such if you want to be picky"), and the means of keeping your crew from turning to paste on the bulkhead during maneuvers.

That makes sense.  I've been doing something similar with fairly hard science with a handful of exceptions; I wanted a setting with lots of worlds that had been colonised by different people over a timespan where for many years starships were a scale of resource available to a medium-sized corporation or university department, followed by discovering fast enough FTL to unexpectedly put all those disparate worlds in contact again after centuries of isolation because that way lies interesting conflict, so my FTL is very much contrived to give the setting I want. 

Plus, I have a species with lifespans in the thousands of years and non-hemoglobin based blood.  Which I suppose might be feasible, but until I can find some more speculative science regarding that bit of speculative biology, I'm calling it "space opera.")

Non-hemoglobin blood is easy, you only have to go as far as lobsters and insects for other oxygen-carrying compounds.  And we have a fair few known species that basically don't die of old age, at least to a scale of centuries; sturgeons in the wild, for one.  (So far as I am aware, the upper bound on that is due to the limits on how long humans have been observing sturgeon.) So that combination would not even need a different life chemistry to read plausibly to me.

[cenwolfgirl]

86 words

[cenwolfgirl]

111 words 

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

Continuity and minor tweaks pass on TIWTBWO #2 yesterday.  I am pretty much happy with it unless anything in it needs tweaking with the changes I am contemplating for #1.

[cenwolfgirl]

that is good