The Goldilocks Planet

I recently read two science fiction novels, written some 50 years apart, with similar premises. One was underwhelming, the other was much better.

At the heart of these two novels was a paradox that's probably endemic to science fiction: the fact that our planet is balanced between precarious conditions that would make it unsuitable for human life. The size of our moon, the thickness of the ozone, the distance of our planet from the sun, the rate of its spin ... the list goes on. Scientists (like Michio Kaku) say our planet inhabits a Goldilocks zone. And yet, the imagination wants to go out into space and find "new worlds and strange civilizations" (to quote an old favorite, though I didn't quite get it right, I think). Given the odds, will we ever find another planet that humans can live on? Could some hypothetical future civilization fare any better?

Most "sci-fi opera" novels (and films) just ignore this problem. Luke Skywalker can breathe the air on any number of planets. So can Edgar Rice Burroughs' hero, John Carter. But the two novels I read recently are more in the "hard sf" camp, taking the "science" part a lot more seriously.

Both novels share the premise that a remarkably earth-like planet has been discovered. A team has been sent to take a closer look. Both planets prove to be too earth-like, too livable for coincidence. And so the major puzzle at the heart of each book is ... how? What's really going on here?

The first one I read was Ben Bova's New Earth, published in 2013. In this novel, humans cannot travel faster than light, and so the humans who arrive at the paradisaical New Earth cannot easily leave or get help from old fashioned earth. Their technology fails them, thanks to the inference of a native species, and they spend the novel trying to find out who these aliens are and why they're messing with the crew.

The second one I read was Mark Clifton's Eight Keys to Eden, published in 1960. Here, humans have mastered FTL travel, mostly because of a group of super-scientists who exist and operate above the law. A team of settlers is sent to "Ceti II," nicknamed "Eden," and find it very easy to thrive--almost too easy. Until, that is, their technology fails them and a super-scientist-in-training is sent in to help them. The hero here gets trapped with the other settlers and has to solve the puzzle with very limited clues, to finally arrive at a way to release himself from the planet--and other things, as well.

By far the more exciting and mind-bending was the older one, by Mark Clifton. Bova's novel was slow-paced and turned on a conflict of mistrust, with a minimum of tension about whether that mistrust was misplaced. Clifton's novel left the reader wondering (until the last minute) both about the alien species and the puzzle that was keeping the humans imprisoned on the planet.

In the end, neither novel solved the riddle, of course. They both concluded (or at least implied) that a planet safe for human life will be too good to be true. But one did this in the interests of encouraging humanity to trust and unity (Bova) and the other in the interests of imagining a higher destiny than space exploration--another level of evolution, so to speak.

Well, that's it. Thanks for reading. Weigh in below if you have any ideas ... I'd love to hear it.

Reading Undine

"Ondine," photo by Eva the Weaver

 Of all fairytales I know, I think Undine the most beautiful

- George MacDonald

I'm not ready to go as far as MacDonald, but I will say that reading Undine, the classic fairy story by Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la Motte, Baron Fouqué (how's that for a French-German hybrid name?), was very pleasurable for me. Here's why.

When I read a new fairy tale, or one I've forgotten, it's like eating a nectarine. You know what it's like. You sit at the table, and in just a moment the soft peel is off that perfectly round fruit. Then it falls apart into slices, tailor made for human mouths. Twelve, thirteen little bites, and it's done--delightful, tangy, juicy, sweet. A perfect snack.

But never a meal.

Now imagine you could have a tangerine and you could eat it for a good half hour, like you would a full dinner. Sound nice?

<< Well, no, you might say. Halfway through the meal, my tongue would get so cloyed from the sweet, juicy, intense thing that I'd lose my appetite.

But suppose I could make it last that long without cloying your palette?

<< Then it would be so watered down that it wouldn't have any flavor, you might object. Or any nutrition at all!

Ah, and there's the beauty of Undine. Somehow, reading this story was like reading a fairy tale that lasts and lasts. Its sweetness is strong enough to engage the palette, but not so strong that it cloys. Its substance is light enough to draw you into the magic of faerie, but not so light that it feels empty or watery.

Somehow--I don't know quite how--Undine draws you into a longer adventure, all framed in the old fairy tale storytelling tradition, with light touches of description and only glimmers of the inner life of the players. Just like a real fairy tale. And yet it doesn't lose your interest in the places where it takes you or the people who live there.

A meal of tangerine. A meal where the tangerine is somehow transformed into something much larger, more substantial even, without losing its essence.

So maybe I can see why MacDonald called it the most beautiful fairy story. Still seems like strong praise. But surprisingly good? I can agree with that.

Note: You can find Undine free at Project Gutenberg, or on an e-reader near you.

Heart's Blood, by Juliet Marillier

"Beauty and the Beast" meets Jane Eyre, with a bit of undead in the mix. What's not to like?

This novel isn't news, I guess, since it was published in 2009 (Roc; released as a mass paperback in 2010). But I just found it, read it, and thought it was worth a few remarks.

I would class Heart's Blood as "mythic fantasy," because it taps into the fairy tale tradition, though not in a heavy-handed way. It's not simply a retelling of a fairy tale (like "Beauty and the Beast"). The main character, Caitrin, is a bit like Jane Eyre, as I hinted above: she enters a situation that's … well, a lot more complicated than it seems at first. There's not exactly a mad wife stowed up in the attic, but it has that feel at times, and some other details call Jane Eyre to mind. Caitrin's a little like Belle, too: she all but plucks forbidden roses early in the tale. Plus, there's a kind of enchantment over the castle, its grounds (Whistling Tor), and its inhabitants--both the servants and their deformed master, Anluan.

(I suppose it's fair to wonder whether Jane Eyre is modeled on "Beauty and the Beast" at some remove or other. Or maybe some other fairy tale. Maybe one you (normally quiet) readers has a theory about that?)

Like Jane, Caitrin is also fleeing an abusive home life, thanks to the sudden death of her father and the misbehavior of distant relatives. Like Belle, she's a looker. And, well, … of course she's got to fall for the crippled master. Right? And vice versa?

So where this novel succeeded for me wasn't in setting up some new permutation of an old fairy tale (or British novel, or both), though it does that, and it does it well. What made it work was how Marillier judiciously loosened the reins on the old storyline, allowing it to take new directions, satisfying because she's drawing on older traditions, but not stale or predictable.

I liked that the Norman (military, i.e. "epic") threat wasn't the point of this story, though it makes a meaningful impact.

And I enjoyed Caitrin's strength. She overcomes real challenges within herself and outside of herself in a credible, heart-warming way. As in countless old folktales, Caitrin finds herself caught in a web of forces beyond her power to control. But with a mixture of hope and small steps of incredible courage, she manages to find her way through--with a bit of fey guidance, to be sure.

Magic. Romantic tension. Mystery. And a strong heroine. Like I said, what's not to like?

Read it? Thoughts?

Thoughts on The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood

I can't prove it, because after reading several interviews and descriptions, she hasn't told me, but I suspect Margaret Atwood followed a kind of intuitive approach in writing The Handmaid's Tale.

By intuitive, I mean that kind of writing in which you allow character, setting, dilemma, to lead the way, rather than a pre-arranged plot. You, the writer, don't know what's going to happen--or at least, not very clearly how you'll get there--when you sit down to write the first chapter. Some people call this the "pantser" (vs. "plotter") approach--writing by the seat of your pants. Bradbury put it like this: "Find out what your hero wants, then just follow him."

Here are my reasons for thinking Atwood tackled The Handmaid's Tale this way:

1. The scenery/environment is well developed, but the trajectory of the main character (Offred) is episodic for much of the book. It lacks a clearly defined "plot."

2. Offred is fully realized; her inner life is available to the reader--or at least as much as it is available to her. This is virtually impossible to achieve, as far as I can tell, in a highly plotted novel, for the simple reason that the characters become cogs in the machinery of plot. In such a novel, the complex, layered thoughts of a character tend to be more hindrance than help, since they'll often lead to unpredictable actions that derail the plot.

3. Atwood remarks that she knew where the story was going, so she didn't have to query herself about it; this suggests that she sometimes does have to query herself--meaning she doesn't plot out in advance. So did she this time? I doubt it. Knowing where the story is heading is a sign of a very realized sense of the character in relation to the situation in which she's been placed--her limitations, or parameters, within that situation, and within her particular personality.

This, in my view, would not mean there would be no persons, situations, or even characters arising in the unfolding of the story that the conscious mind has not planned in advance. For instance, when Atwood placed Offred in a relationship with a married man (in her past; "Luke"), did she foresee the tension this would create with Serena Joy, the wife of the Commander for whom she's a "handmaid"? Or did this rather come to her in the telling of the story, a "lucky happenstance," a chance encounter that presented another layer to the story? Because, to me at least, this element complicates a simple before=good/after=bad equation. And I find it convenient to suppose that Atwood's subconscious resisted that equation, more than (or as much as) her conscious mind.

But, of course, I'm only guessing. Call it intuition.

Well, I promised "thoughts" and really have only given you one. So let me add another, unrelated: Somehow it doesn't bother me that Atwood has distanced herself from sci-fi. In one article I found (in the Guardian), she admits to writing sci-fi, "or speculative fiction, if you prefer." A writer like her, working in "literary" fiction as well as speculative (or sci-fi), can be excused for wanting to distance herself from space octopi. Just saying.

If you've read the novel (or better yet, an interview or confession I couldn't find; or better still, you are Margaret Atwood) and you'd like to weigh in, I'm all ears.


Update: I overlooked an interview with Margaret Atwood in The Paris Review when I was writing this post. It turns out I was right. Here's what she says:

When I’m writing a novel, what comes first is an image, scene, or voice. Something fairly small. Sometimes that seed is contained in a poem I’ve already written. The structure or design gets worked out in the course of the writing. I couldn’t write the other way round, with structure first. It would be too much like paint-by-numbers. As for lines of descent—that is, poem leading to novel—I could point to a number of examples. In my second collection of poems, The Animals in That Country, there’s a poem called “Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer.” That led into the whole collection called The Journals of Susanna Moodie and that in turn led into Surfacing. Or, another line of descent, the poems in parts of True Stories have obvious affiliations with the novel Bodily Harm. It’s almost as if the poems open something, like opening a room or a box or a pathway. And then the novel can go in and see what else is in there. I’m not sure this is unique. I expect that many other ambidextrous writers have had the same experience.

Twice-Read Authors

I recently listed some “twice-read books” as a way to share my interests as a reader. But some of my favorite authors were left off, because though I’ve read more than one book of theirs, I haven’t necessarily read any of their books twice.

But if reading a book says something about you, I think reading more than one book by an author might, too. After all, these are folks I came back to because they offered me something—however lowbrow or highbrow that was. They represent only a small percentage of all the authors I’ve read. Life is full, and there are many books. If I’ve dipped back into the well of an author, that probably means something.

Not counting trilogies and series as more than one book, or authors that after reading a second one I knew it was mistake, here are the ones I remember, in roughly the order in which I read them (or came back to them):

Jack London

C. S. Lewis

Mark Twain

H. G. Wells

J.R.R. Tolkien

Stephen Lawhead

George MacDonald

Patricia McKillip

Ray Bradbury

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Pushkin

Tolstoy

Shakespeare (not just for school!)

Franz Kafka

Ernest Hemingway

Isaac Asimov

Orson Scott Card

Ursula K. Le Guin

Jane Austin

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Gabriel Garcia Márquez

Dean Koontz

Daphne Du Maurier

Henry James

George Eliot

Stephen King

Jane Yolen

W. P. Kinsella

Paulo Cuelho

Neil Gaiman

I think that list shows a few things about me: I tend to gravitate toward (and enjoy!) classical authors. If I’m adventurous (and sometimes I am), it’s only for a short fling—so they don’t make the list. Paperback writers are almost unknown to me (this is quite true). For me reading is an event, a cultural experience. That might make me limited in some ways, particularly in knowing what may appeal to the masses. But we are what we are. I like an intensely well crafted story, careful language, depth of meaning—except when I don’t.

Who’s on your list?

Editing as Following the Story

Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/92804037@N00 inajeep

Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/92804037@N00 inajeep

I've made no secret that I'm perpetually reworking a story I wrote several years ago (See Snow White and Her Shepherd). Recently I took it up again, after another break. Some parts still aren't jelling for me. But after all these several rewrites, what more can I do?

What I've come to see this time through the story is that I've gotten better at what feels like an essential skill of my craft: following the story. Seem obvious? At the rewrite stage, this is very difficult to do. There's a kind of inertial drift to the story. It goes this way, because it's already down on paper this way. And something in me has tended to resist upsetting the order or the drift of the words already there. One has to get past that readerly impulse that treats a story as a thing complete, wrapped around in cellophane, observable but beyond shaping. "Following the story" is different than reading what you've already written. It may mean ignoring what you've written.

The whisper of the story comes, for me, by way of nagging sensations of doubt. What is my hero doing here? What happened to the wound he received on page 12? Why is this land lush and green and not dry and wind-blown? Or why is it built up like a medieval fortress when it should be earthy and wild?

The key, the thing I feel I'm getting better at with practice, is the capacity to trace the offending element to its root and excise it. But rarely can you get away with a surgical removal. The thing that's offending is bound up with your original misperception of the story. In taking it out, you are changing the fabric of the whole. And so, at least for me, you have to begin following the story forward again, from that point. You have to listen patiently for every change that your excision requires, as you read, edit, rewrite, rework, mold the materials of the story.

But it's this constant listening, this ear to the story, to following its course as you would a fragile stream in a thick wood, under heavy brush and leaves, not knowing--again--where precisely it will take you. It's the admission that you're following--not reading, but searching out the story again. That's key.

Twice-Read Books

"If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads."

- François Mauriac (courtesy of Kara Monterey, @kmonterey)

Intrigued by this quote, I’ve pulled together a list. This is the order in which they occurred to me. I’ve not been one to read many things more than once, so the list is short. When you’ve looked through it, and been duly shocked and amazed by my tastes, I’d love to see what would be on your list.

The Chronicles of Narnia, The Space Trilogy, The Screwtape Letters

The Bible

Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, The Gambler, Notes from Underground

The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit

Strunk and White

The Brothers Grimm

Stephen Lawhead’s Song of Albion Trilogy (The Paradise War, The Silver Hand, The Endless Knot), Dream Thief

Patricia McKillip's Riddle of Stars Trilogy

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

Phantastes, by George MacDonald

The Odyssey

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle

Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Eyre

My Father's Dragon, by Ruth Stiles Gannett

Alice in Wonderland

The Wizard of Oz

Beowulf

Selected Poems of Ezra Pound

Any number of picture books, but especially Dr. Seuss

I don't know that this reveals my "heart," but it says something about the kinds of stories I like. There's a bit of my history in there too, and no doubt some of my personality comes through.

Thoughts?

Rewriting: A Few Thoughts

A copy of Mark Twain’s autobiography fell into my lap this summer. I’ve read it off and on since, hitting page 300 just today. In chapter 53 (this is the Charles Neider-edited version of 1959), Twain discusses works in progress and works abandoned. He also talks there about rewriting.

This past summer, I too (humble me) rewrote a novel that I originally wrote some fifteen years ago. This is unusual for me. Everything else that I wrote in that period has long since gone the way of all old computer files and notebooks. But this story I have rewritten now three or four times. I keep trying to get it write. (Freudian slip? Let it stand.)

My new tack, this time, was the mantra, “I’m starting to get bored here.” Wherever the plot dragged along, slogged down, got needlessly embroiled, I cut to the good thing (the interesting thing) that should happen next (I knew this, because I had written the story before, you see). I leaped over earlier drafts’ complications and hindrances – and never looked back.

One thing that helped – trust me, one needs “help” with such a thing – was the realization that I could just save a new version of the file whenever I hit that point. Another was that I didn’t try to edit the existing work, but to rewrite from a blank sheet, with the old draft on the desk at my elbow. I sometimes typed as much as a page or two without changing a lot. I called this rewrite “New Try,” and I got up to #7 by the end.

Back to Twain: “In Rouen in ’93 I destroyed $15,000 worth of manuscript, and in Paris in the beginning of ’94 I destroyed $10,000 worth—I mean, estimated as magazine stuff. I was afraid to keep those piles of manuscript on hand lest I be tempted to sell them …”

And here’s another: “In the story of Joan of Arc I made six wrong starts and each time that I offered the result to Mrs. Clemens she responded with the same deadly criticism—silence…. When at last I found the right form I recognized at once that it was the right one and I knew what she would say.”

He says a little later: “To start right is certainly an essential…. Twenty-five or thirty years ago I began a story… Four times I started it in the wrong way and it wouldn’t go. Three times I discovered my mistake after writing about a hundred pages. I discovered it the fourth time when I had written four hundred pages—then I gave it up and put the whole thing in the fire.”

Compared to Twain, I know, I have been weak. And that’s not good. But his courage inspires me. And, as he says, that's what heroes are for: "Our heroes are the men who do things which we recognize with regret and sometimes with a secret shame that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else."

The Great Art of Fantasy

Mortimer Adler, in his classic "How to Read a Book," suggested five questions to help readers evaluate the artistic quality of a novel (and I quote):

1.     To what degree does the work have unity?

2.     How great is the complexity of parts and elements which that unity embraces and organizes?

3.     Is it a likely story, that is, does it have the inherent plausibility of poetic truth?

4.     Does it elevate you from the ordinary semiconsciousness of daily life to the clarity of intense wakefulness, by stirring your emotions and filling your imagination?

5.     Does it create a new world into which you are drawn and wherein you seem to live with the illusion that you are seeing life steadily and whole?

He writes, “I will not defend these questions beyond saying that the more they can be answered affirmatively, the more likely it is that the book in question is a great work of art. I think they will help you to discriminate between good and bad fiction, as well as to become more articulate in explaining your likes and dislikes.”

Adler says nothing about fantasy fiction (why would he, writing in 1940?). But his questions four and five would suggest, as J.R.R. Tolkien claimed, that fantasy done well can be one of the highest forms of literary art, bar none. (Of course, where it fails, it can also be among the worst.) In fact, Adler’s questions might even suggest that “literary” fiction succeeds only insofar as it approximates what Tolkien called “subcreation”—a thing at which the best of fantasy excels.

After all, what kind of imaginative writing better “elevates you from the ordinary semiconsciousness of daily life,” especially “to the clarity of intense wakefulness,” than the kind that takes you out of our own world to another realm? For it to achieve this elevation, though, the writer's craft has to have that same intense wakefulness about it. It can't be a sleepy hodge-podge of worn tropes, but must select its detail with precision. The best fantasy does this as well as any kind of writing.

For that matter, what kind of fiction creates “a new world into which you are drawn and wherein you seem to live” more completely than the kind that requires “subcreation” of a world in the author’s imagination?

In fact, done well, fantasy can also excel at what Adler calls the “inherent plausibility of poetic truth.” Not factual truth, of course—which isn’t the point of fiction, after all—but the truth that is deeper than factuality, that touches the soul.

Needless to say, “literary” fiction (perhaps better termed “realism” fiction, in this conversation) can attain to high art. Honed language and clarity of thought and expression can bring us into an alternate version of our own world, in which none of the fanciful elements (like magic, or strange geography, or otherworldly creatures) plays a part. This alternate world is so like ours that the reader has no need to learn special rules, except those of the writer's peculiar point of view. But it is, as the life of an imaginary person living in an imaginary society (albeit one very like ours), an instance of "subcreation." It simply doesn't go as far in the process of subcreation as fantasy does. Or maybe we should say that it cloaks its subcreation more intentionally than does fantasy.

Meanwhile, fantasy, rather than cloaking its imaginative work, tends to cloak the similarities that exist between its imagined world and our own.

Both, then--the "realism" fiction and the "fantasy" sort--have the power to bring us out of semi-consciousness to a wakeful state, a new recognition of the world in which we live.

And so, a work in either genre can be termed "a great work of art." At least in Adler's way of defining it.

Intuitive Writing

Serendipity? Not long after I wrote my last post, Terri Windling posted an eloquent testament to the intuitive approach to creating art – visual, narrative, poetic. (If you'e not seen it, jump over there for a wealth of insight and inspiration. Trust me, it's rich.) That discussion has inspired me to reflect a bit more on the theme.

I remember a time when I felt guilty, actually guilty, that I wasn’t “doing my homework” when I wrote stories. I’d been told to plan out my stories in advance, write outlines, give my characters little biographies, work up a complex portrait of scene and society. All that before you write – so I’d been told. This advice came via all sorts of channels, mostly writing guides. But it also seemed to be what one my literary heroes, Dostoevsky, did – as far as I could tell from reading the introductory articles to his works. (I now think his approach was more intuitive than I then supposed.)

Still, I persisted in being “lazy,” jumping into my stories with almost no idea what would happen, hardly a clear idea of who was who, and at most a vague sense of where the story might go. All I knew was a dilemma or an idea, a concept of some kind. My excuse was that I didn’t have time to do all that other work. That if I did that, I’d never get a chance to write the story, explore the idea. But the deeper reason was that I just didn’t want to do it. It evoked from me a deep, internal “uggh.”

Only slowly have I come to see that this is not a bad thing. As I mentioned in my last post, I came across the other sort of advice later in my apprenticeship. I’ve eavesdropped on artists I admire, and found out they do what I do – that they loathe the notion of planning all this out in advance. That it empties the work of its joy, and saps the potential of the story itself, or their creative process. So I gave up that guilt and just started writing.

And then something happened. I had a novel that I’d rewritten a couple of times, and on the last rewrite a character had emerged out of the woodwork into the story and, despite almost no presence on the page, had played a vital role in its unfolding. And one night, though I can’t swear it kept me up, she nagged at me. She wanted me to tell her story. I thought, “This is silly. It doesn’t make sense to write the story of a minor character in an unrevised novel.” But … well, she kept nagging, in an intriguing sort of way. So, to appease her, I jotted down some four or five lines, sketching out what I knew about her and what I didn’t. It turned out that I knew quite a bit more than I suspected, but I put it aside, still thinking it was foolish to obey this impulse.

Then, a few days later, I opened up that little document, about as close to an outline as I’d ever gotten, and I wrote about two paragraphs in her voice, coming from the point in the story where she awakened from her own hardship into hope. And that cracked open my resistance. The whole story was there. It was simply a matter of finding out how we got to that tangled knot, and how it would untangle for her.

I wrote it, thinking it was awful. I almost gave up, then went back and glanced over some earlier pages – realized it wasn’t awful. After that, I wrote it with fear that I would destroy what had begun. And then gradually I just gave up my fear and prejudice and reservations, and I wrote her story with a kind of astonished, listening ear.

If any of my novels makes its way before you, I hope it’s this one. Later this summer I plan to send out her story. But if no one notices her, at least I did. And I feel a kind of awe and pride in having done so.

Like this? Come see my new blog, Fairy Spell.

Two Kinds of Writing Advice

As a writer, I've been on the receiving end of plenty of writing tips, strategies, how-tos, and how-not-tos. Looking back at this wealth of opinion on how to craft good stories, compelling characters, believeable worlds, etc., I see some patterns. In particular, two overarching approaches to writing stand out: the blueprint approach and the intuitive one.

Let me preface this post by saying that writing advice was important to my growth as a writer. When I was learning the craft (and when aren’t we?), I plowed through a lot of how-to manuals (I still pick at them). I got my Writer’s Market and read all those articles (well, almost all of them). I checked out volumes from the library and worked through them. I wouldn’t go back now and undo that—even for the advice I’ve rejected. When I started reading advice, I’d already written a lot of stories, and these manuals taught me about revisions, preseverence, inspiration, what works and what won’t, and more. The more advice you can get when you’re starting out, the better.

But after you read a lot of writing advice, you realize that some kinds of advice work better for you than others. I suspect other beginners have experienced this. I’ve identified two general approaches, and I’ll first discuss the one I encountered first. Since I was working especially on “how to write fantasy,” and especially novels, I’ll focus on that kind of advice.

1. The blueprint approach. The first approach to “how to write a fantasy novel” is to tackle the pieces, or elements, of the novel. These would include the world in which your story takes place (including the type of magic in that world, and its role in that world), the characters and their personalities (plus what kinds of creatures will exist in your world), the dilemma those characters must face, the way that dilemma unfolds (the plot), and such smaller pieces as “scenes” that occur in the larger story arc.

Proponents of the blueprint approach often advise us to build exciting, interesting, and believable worlds, populate them with exciting and interesting characters (not too perfect), and throw them into a situation that is also exciting and interesting. They might tell us how to construct a kick-ass plot line, how to make dialogue zing, and how to give depth to characters. If you follow their advice, you can (perhaps) build something readable or at least something halfway there.

2. The intuitive approach. The second approach begins from the other side, so to speak. If the first approach builds the story like a house, the second feels its way into it by a door or window (or perhaps a crack in the foundation). In the second approach, there is a house but no blueprint, because the writer does not know where she or he is going. Probably the most widely read description of this approach is Stephen King’s On Writing. King disavows plots altogether, claiming he is not (nor does he ever desire to be) a plotting person. He starts with an idea (an intuition), a new combination of two things, and he describes the unfolding of the story as a discovery, not a construction project.

But other writers say similar things. Ursula LeGuin informs us that she did not know what existed on the islands of Earthsea until she “went there” with her characters. She too seemingly intuits, discovers through writing. Jane Yolen tells us that she writes like a reader, not knowing what will happen next (and interested to find out).

This intuitive approach to writing is less commonly encountered in how-to guides, and for an obvious reason: it’s hard to give concrete advice about following your intuition. (Though Stephen King did a pretty good job.) What’s more, writers who take this approach tend not to gravitate toward “how-to” thinking in the first place. They aren’t blueprint sorts of people.

Which brings me to the impetus behind this post, and its final point. If, like the second group, you’re an intuitive, idea-oriented person, you’ll probably find the blueprint approach mechanical, devoid of excitement, turning the writer into a typewriter. If you’re the blueprint sort, you’ll probably find the intuitive approach overwhelming, lacking focus or direction, confronting the writer with an intimidating blank page.

The point is, then, to discover which kind of writer you are. I wish I had known sooner; I would have spent less time trying to pinpoint the exact beginning and end of a scene in my novel, and more time thinking inside the scene. Maybe this post will help you avoid a similar pitfall.

Narnia as Faerie

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis says that Father Christmas is the sort of person you only meet in a place like Narnia. But what is a “place like Narnia”? Isn’t there only one such place, with talking animals, tree-spirits, giants, spells, dwarfs, prophecies, and the sharp contrast of good-and-evil?

Come to think of it, there is. J. R. R. Tolkien called it “faerie.” Ursula K. LeGuin called it “Elfland.” If you’ve been there, you know that place. (If you haven’t, pick up some fairy tales and start reading!)

What makes Narnia faerie—the realm of nature-magic, deep as the land? I’ve mentioned some of its trappings. But, as Ursula K. LeGuin reminds us, trappings do not a good fantasy make. And, love it or don’t, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a good fantasy. An authentic journey into faerie—a kind of faerie, too, that you can see and feel in your mind.

Lewis achieved just the right mix of realism and magic. The rules of Narnia are clear, things aren’t arbitrary—people really do bleed there—and yet the magic is real (within discernible limits). So is that what makes this novel a journey into faerie? The skillful realization of magic within a believable world? Does technique a good fantasy make?

Or is it the fact that it is a journey, through a portal and into a woods—for it does start in the woods, like many fairy tales. Is it the fanciful device of the wardrobe, a new thing (relatively speaking) juxtaposed with an old thing (the faerie wood)? Does that make it authentic fantasy, a journey into faerie?

Or is it the sharp contrast between good and evil? The White Witch couldn’t be more evil; Aslan couldn’t be more good. Is this stark contrast what gives it that magical quality?

Or what about the smallness of the characters? Lucy, the youngest of four and a girl (in patriarchal England) is first to discover the portal. And she’s the one who seems closest to Aslan—she and Susan, in the first book, and Lucy alone as the adventures unfold. Even Peter is only a child, though a very responsible, grown-up eldest son. Edmund, who experiences the greatest transformation (after Narnia itself), is the proto-typical younger brother. These little people, small characters, become—but don’t start out as—realm-shapers. They fall into something that’s already been going on. They’re the target of prophecies of old, innocent though they are of them. Does this, then, constitute Narnia as faerie?

No. It’s like chasing the wind, or defining the shape of a spirit. Narnia feels like faerie because, in some mysterious way, C. S. Lewis opens a door on faerie. It’s faerie as C. S. Lewis encountered it. And he had the elfish power to weave its odors and sights around us.

I don’t think he could have done it, if he hadn’t been there himself.

My First Journey to Mars

For several weeks, I’ve been trying to remember how it happened that my first-ever novella was firmly in the science fiction genre. The year would have been 1984 or 1985. Let me describe the story for you:

An astronaut, haunted by dreams of his own death, agrees to go through with a scheduled mission to Mars. Once there, he somehow wanders from the space craft and is lost. Instead of dying, however, he finds himself among a colony of Martians, who live underground. (In my memory, the place is sort of hellish, but I could be misremembering this.) After spending some time among the Martians, our astronaut somehow makes his way out of the Mars camp, or at least makes contact with earth. His time among the Martians somewhat mirrors first contact between Europeans and Native Americans, though without the exploitation. (At least that was how I envisioned it, though I never finished that part.)

You’ll see that it’s pretty standard fare for sci-fi. The strange part, though, is that I hadn’t read any “standard fare” sci-fi. I’d never read H. G. Wells, or Jules Verne, or Ray Bradbury, or (as far as I can remember) any science fiction at all. (I know I did read Orwell’s 1984 that year for school.) I must have watched enough television, although this was very limited in my household. Even so, I’m sure by then I’d seen sci-fi movies. For instance, I saw The Last Starfighter in 1984. I saw Star Wars (only the first one) a couple of years earlier (on VHS). No doubt I’d seen “Star Trek” reruns (not yet the movies, I think), and possibly some others I can’t track down.

I gave up the story unfinished, because I either got distracted or couldn’t get the middle to work out. I had several competing drafts, and had started in the middle. I don’t think it was even the only story I was working on at the time. Some things never change …

I don’t remember this, but I’ve rediscovered that NASA had sent two space probes to Mars (the “Viking” probes) when I was about five years old, with the hope of (and equipment for) discovering life on Mars. Maybe I’d learned about it in science class, connected that to my American history, threw in a little T.V. or movies and—voila! My own first unfinished novel.

I wrote it in study hall.

This has me thinking about the old adage that you have to read a lot in a particular genre to write something worthwhile in that genre, and the somewhat competing adage to be careful not to imitate what’s selling, or it will be soulless. (I might have made that second one up.) My story falls between those two adages. It wasn’t good, but then again I wrote it when I was thirteen or fourteen. The reason it wasn’t good, was that I didn’t know how to write. Everything I did was pretty much straight imitation. That, and the idea wasn’t one I’d pursue now. But I can imagine this idea or one like it being done well, if the writer knew what he/she was doing. In fact, this story (it seems to me) shares elements of Event Horizon, a 1997 film, the novel Dream Thief by Stephen Lawhead (written in 1983, but not read by me until a decade later), and The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells (which I read about five years ago).

So, the plot itself isn’t a terrible one, nor is it so overdone that it couldn’t catch someone’s interest—in 1985, I mean. One of the reasons for that, I suspect, is that I was probably as much influenced by Robinson Crusoe, which I read in sixth grade, as I was by the sci-fi “genre” itself. Which makes me think that reading “in genre” isn’t as important as reading classic literature. Or at least not more important than. I’m open to other opinions.

Sadly (ahem), the manuscript is lost, I do firmly believe.

Snow White and Her Shepherd

Today’s post will be a little more personal. For years now, off and on, I’ve been working on a fantasy story about a shepherd, Foldwin, who crosses paths with a wild, beautiful, enchanted young woman. Call it my pet project. Or maybe my apprenticeship.

I started the story as a gift for my wife, who loves fairy tales. In fact, the bones of the story trace back to a road trip in which, to while away the time, she and I hatched a short adventure about an enchanted girl driven from home by a jealous mother, and the farm boy who agrees to escort her home—not knowing what he’s in for, of course. When I sat down a couple of years later to write the tale down, it came out much longer than I’d expected. Challenges and twists presented themselves, and—in the spirit of Tolkien’s essay, “On Fairy Stories”—I met them, unafraid to dip into the cauldron of tales, such I knew it then.

Some things I drew out of that cauldron included talking donkeys, a snowy mountain, a wicked queen with an enchanted mirror, and a golden realm—faerie within faerie, so to speak. The girl, unbeknownst to me, was a kind of Snow White figure, though without the gullible passivity. In fact, she scared the life out of that poor shepherd, half the time, even though—predictably—he fell in love with her.

In the end, the story stretched to almost 50,000 words—a short novel, and one of the longest things I’d written up to that point. I combed out some of the worst tangles and presented it to her. And she liked it very much.

That probably could have, and maybe even should have, been the end of that story. But I took in my mind that, rather than just working at a factory forty hours a week (as I was then doing), I might be able to write my way out of such tedium and into something much better. Or at least, I thought, maybe I can write my way out of debt. So I began the long process of trying to learn about publishing, and I edited and completed earlier stories and started sending them out. I worked over Foldwin too, and sent it to several publishers. They all liked the sound of it, all ordered a fuller sample, and all passed on it. (Shrug)

So I shelved it. Then re-edited it, sent it out a couple more times. Then shelved it again.

And came back to it years later. (It’s on my shelf again, but that’s not where this is going.) In an earlier post, I referred to the perils of embarking on a journey to faerie. This is my prime example. “Foldwin the Shepherd” was (and is) in essence a fairy story. As such, it had the tendency (in the earlier drafts) to pass over as assumed things that, in a novel, ought to be explained. Such as why a shepherd would volunteer to help a wild, standoffish young woman. In the fairy tales, the shepherd would obviously do that—it’s how he and the reader embark on the story itself. So it was in my story. But at 50k words, you don’t get to pull that stunt. Novel readers expect some probing of the characters’ psyche, or at least an account of their motivations.

Putting in that kind of insight added thirty-five thousand words to the second draft. But then other things had to be explained. And, for that matter, angles and tensions and suspense suggested themselves for inclusion. After all, in a fairy tale of three pages, you don’t have a lot of time for themes or suspense. In a story of 75k words, you better have those, or your reader will feel like a part in an assembly line, experiencing discreet whams from a series of dies (with apologies for the factory metaphor …).

When it comes to themes and tensions, though, a fairy story presents unique challenges. For one thing, it strips away the limitations of our mundane life and, in their place, it demands an accounting of the laws of the story world. It demands that I, the writer, know why certain things can (and must) happen there, and what the new limitations are. For me, this meant becoming a more astute observer of nature in all its guises. I needed to learn how and why there was enchantment and magic, why donkeys could speak, and why the witch-queen surrounded herself with snow. All this while I was trying to learn the mechanics of good novel writing.

But aside from these technical matters, a fairy story demands from the writer an honest self-knowledge that, at that point in my life, I was still learning to embrace. Or maybe I should say it requires an openness to self-disclosure, a willingness to encounter oneself in strange places, to see oneself as something you had not expected to be. I think—I’m far from alone—that fantasy makes peculiar demands here, though my experience with quality literary fiction suggests a similar process.

In the end, my own complex rendering of a Snow White tale has turned out to be a kind of apprenticeship in fairy story creation. What I didn’t expect, was that I would be fashioned so much in the process.

Postscript: An excellent article on the Snow White strand of folk tales, by Terri Windling, can be found here. Among other things, it gives other examples of more pro-active Snow White figures.

Fantasy - according to Terri Windling

Terri Windling once gave a speech in which she laid out two realms of fantasy produced in the twentieth century:

those rooted in the grand themes, symbols, and language of myth, epic, and romance, and those rooted in the humbler stuff of folklore and fairy tales. The first category includes tales epic in scope, full of sweeping heroic adventures and battles on which the fate of worlds, or at least kingdoms, depend. The latter category includes much smaller tales, more intimate in nature — stories of individual rites of passage and personal transformation.

These two realms of fantasy, in turn, hark back to two very different ancient story-telling traditions. The epic kind, as she mentions, grows out of the court—the elite circles in which men of power and substance (or their supporters) passed down authoritative accounts of the world. Some of these epics can be quite profound meditations on the meaning of human existence, the struggle against corruption and overwhelming evil, or just the existential question of life’s meaning in the face of death. Think of Homer and Beowulf. Battle scenes are important to epic, partly because the story of struggle against evil foes is one way political regimes justify power. Romance, too, of the chivalrous kind, concerns men (and their consorts) in the aureate glow of the king and his court.

Windling’s second category harks back to a separate tradition of storytelling. As she puts it, “The oral folk tale tradition, on the other hand, was a peasant tradition, and a largely female one.” That peasant tradition, then, is less likely to be about the rise and fall of great empires, than to be about the rise and fall of a sharp-tongued girl, a submissive daughter, or an uppity son. Storytellers in this folk tradition work on themes that are no less hair-raising, no less pregnant with magic and evil. They’re simply for a different audience.

In some ways, in fact, the magic in the “peasant tradition” can be more unexpected and, therefore, more terrifying, more grim—maybe even more potent.

Modern fantasy novels generally take their departure, says Windling, from one or the other tradition. They can depart far from that tradition, of course, and individual writers can work in both mediums. There are no doubt instances where the two seem to merge. Literature rarely holds to type.

But Windling’s observations are worth bearing in mind. They offer a helpful corrective to thinking of “fantasy” as inevitably in the epic mode. Effective fantasy can thrive without battles, drawn swords or sieges on towns--with none of the machinery of war. It can have small people, girls and boys or peasants or herb-swilling old women … caught up in smaller tensions of magic or finding escape through it. And it can surprise us with its human insights along the way.

The Consolations of Fantasy: "On Fairy Stories," Part 3

J.R.R. Tolkien argued, toward the end of his essay “On Fairy Stories,” that one of the gifts fantasy brings to humankind is a glimpse of joy, a sudden “turn,” an undeserved gift. It does this through an outcome he called “eucatastrophe.” (The prefix “eu-” comes from the Greek language and means “good.”)

Tolkien thought fairy stories bring us consolation from a “catastrophe” turned good, or (put the other way) happy endings tinged with sadness. Later fantasy, following in Tolkien’s shadow, has not always kept faith with this idea. Two trends in fantasy novels, though apparent opposites, both diverge significantly from Tolkien’s vision.

First is the (rightly criticized) tendency for fantasy-novel heroes to be invincible. Facing ludicrously powerful forces of evil, they come through unscathed. This quality, whenever we see it, fails to measure up to Tolkien’s perception of “eucatastrophe” because it overemphasizes the “eu” part and forgets the other: catastrophe. Something terrible has to happen, some irreparable damage has to be done to somebody we care about, or the good outcome loses its poignancy and joy. If you want an excellent illustration of this, just think of Frodo before he leaves Middle Earth. Frodo is damaged—irreparably so. His heroic feat costs him his “humanity,” if I can call it that.

That outcome is not accidental. For Tolkien, there can’t be any consolation where genuine suffering is not recognized. (Anybody who’s ever been handed a platitude in the face of real personal tragedy knows this.) If the hero of a fantasy story is, in effect, invincible, a person who never suffers real injury or hardship, then the tale will be incapable of giving us one of the gifts that is fantasy’s birthright—at least, according to Tolkien.

Many people—readers and writers and editors among them—have been unsatisfied with such invincible heroes. As a result, we’re seeing an opposite trend, a reaction that also, however, fails to fill the role Tolkien envisioned for “fantasy.” Bluntly: I’m talking about so-called “gray characters.” These characters are “human,” at our worst and most egocentric. They lie, cheat, avenge themselves. If they do something “good,” it’s for despicable reasons. There’s no “good” versus “evil,” no heroes and villains, just the soft, spongy middle.

This, we are told, is “gritty realism.” And it might be that, but it’s also not “eucatastrophe.” It’s not what you get in the fairy stories. It gives no consolation—far from it. The accent has shifted to the “catastrophe”—except that here there isn’t “evil” in the old sense of the word, either. Catastrophe becomes the constant, the uninterrupted state of existence.

The first departure—failing to embrace the existence of real suffering, so that consolation can be provided by the unexpected “turn”—might be relatively harmless next to this second one. Because a brutal insistence on only “gray characters” and death and mayhem may—I hope not, but it probably does—amount to a denial of the possibility of “joy,” of hope, of the dream of goodness, that the fairy stories sometimes offered. Certainly Tolkien’s work offered it: those of us who love it are left with a keen yearning to visit Minas Tirith under Aragorn’s benevolent rule, or (for us democratic Americans) a long stay in the Shire, among people (hobbits, that is) who are genuine if a little provincial.

No doubt, many and greater champions of Tolkien can be found than me, but I want to join my voice to theirs. His characters are not perfect, and they aren’t unrealistic or one-sided, either. The best example here is Frodo. Think of it: he starts out good, he wants to do the right thing—so far, I think that’s like most of us. Check one. He’s a “little person” faced with forces beyond his control or understanding or capacity to overcome. Check two—so are most of us. Frodo’s asked to do something extraordinary, and he reluctantly agrees. Some of us have done the same; many of us, for instance, faced with an invalid child or parent make the “good” choice, the “right” one, the unselfish one, to care for that child or parent ourselves. People make such hard choices every day. Yes, their motives might be mixed. But they embark, wanting to do the right thing. And don’t forget, Tolkien lived during an era renowned for self-sacrifice. So, check three.

But what happens to Frodo at the end of this story? Let’s fast forward to the culmination of his quest, when he stands at the cracks of Mount Doom and, after all his work and all his suffering for “doing the right thing”—he fails. He can’t quite bring himself to do the self-sacrificial deed he intended at the beginning. He puts on the ring and he, little exhausted Frodo, defies Sauron. Check four—most of us would have failed too, in analogous circumstances. Think of the dutiful person taking care of that invalid child or parent, day after day, year after year. And losing, in the midst of all that, the thread of why she was doing it. And maybe coming to loathe the child or parent, in small and maybe larger ways. Or maybe feeling cheated in life—and even acting out to restore the balance.

As fantasy should for Tolkien, the “eucatastrophe” comes as the result of an unexpected turn. Gollum bites off the finger; Frodo’s original resolve is brought about despite his failure at the end. That part doesn’t have to be “realistic,” because this is “fantasy”—it draws on the fairy tale tradition, where such a turn is part of the magic of the story itself. How does Cinderella win the day without that lost slipper? Or the magic that got her to the ball? If you want nitty-gritty (and who doesn’t, sometimes?), fantasy might not be the best place to seek or find it.

But the catastrophe isn’t over yet. Frodo is damaged; he can no longer continue in Middle Earth. He’s saved his world from oppressive malice, but he’s lost the world for himself. He exits the novel a wounded figure. The battle against evil takes a real toll.

No, Tolkien’s characters and realms aren’t perfect; they have their faults and weaknesses. But when it really matters, they normally do the right things, or at least they want to. I think that’s more like most of us, or at least more of us than some folks like to admit. But even if you think all humans are so hopelessly corrupt that no one would have done what the “fellowship” did, the role of fantasy is not to show us the world as we normally live it, but rather to offer us a vision of the world that’s touched by “faerie,” by a magic that’s not about grasping but dreaming. Part of that dream is for people, realms, choices, that are good, at least in part. Or at least they struggle toward being good. And in the outcome, as cliché as some people may find it, without the “happy ending” that Tolkien said was “essential”—a happy ending tinged with sad, real loss—fantasy might just turn out not worth the hard work it demands.

[Note: This is the third of three posts on Tolkien’s essay, “On Fairy Stories.” The other two are here and here.]

Longing for the Medieval

"Bedrock Fortress," by t.j. blackwell

One of the delights of fantasy novels is their ability to take us to places we’d like to go. If that’s true—I think it usually is—then it’s interesting that so many fantasy novels take place in a kind of medieval world.

If you think about it, most of us were taught in school (or somewhere) that the Middle Ages were a superstitious, unenlightened age, where people died young from plagues and constant warfare, and they had to sleep on dirt or stone floors and live indoors without good windows. Those were the “dark ages.” No science; no medicine. Nobody could read, either, so people didn’t get to think for themselves.

If you’re American, you also were probably taught to associate that time with the terrible idea of “kings,” both high kings and petty ones. I remember in particular learning about the feudal system, with peons and lords and constant battles, and walled cities and the whole thing. Nobody envied those peons. Nobody thought highly of those lords, either.

So, if I’m remembering correctly, if all of us really were taught to think of the Middle Ages as backward and superstitious, why do we all want to go there?

Before I hazard a guess, I want to point out one thing that rarely gets included in the fantasy medieval past: the Church. If you dip into a book like A Day in a Medieval City, by Chiara Frugoni, you’ll discover that the Church was everywhere in the Middle Ages. It was in the middle of most cities (which weren’t all that large), and there were monasteries, abbeys, and such things all around the countryside. (Twain’s Connecticut Yankee makes good dramatic use of this fact.) Churches and steeples and friars and monks appear all over medieval tapestries—as do hell, and the manifold torments of its occupants. To use a Twain-esque expression, you couldn’t swing a … er, rope … without hitting a monk or a friar or some other cleric, in the medieval past.

My point is that the fantasy novel doesn’t give exactly a realistic picture of medieval life. I don’t mean that it should. For one thing, this strange silence about religion, which you’ll find in Tolkien already, might be due to the fairy tale and folktale influence on the genre. After all, European folktales were passed down—if not invented—in a society permeated by the Church and its representatives. And yet, rare is the monk or nun or friar in one of these tales, and far more seldom still is the tale really “religious,” especially “Christian,” in any explicit way. (This topic is for another day.) Moral, yes; religious, not especially.

So one possible caricature is: Fantasy novels happen in a vaguely medieval society where, as in fairy tales, the Church is not a real player—religion isn’t the point. To answer our question—“Why?”—you might say that fantasy novels, out of respect for tradition, take place in the same half-articulate social set-up that the folktales assume.

But I think it goes beyond that. I think for many fantasy fans, we experience a longing for a pre-technocratic society. We want to “go there,” where you have to start a fire with a flint (whatever that is) and, if you’re going to reach a remote kingdom, you have to walk through a barren countryside where there aren’t any good roads or automobiles or railroad tracks. Maybe a forest. This might be happening in some land that we can’t find on a map—in fact, all the better. We just want to go there, to Middle Earth (maybe especially there), and live where elves are not far off and dwarves might be inside a mountain. Or dragons might still plague people who live in houses with roofs of thatch. Something about that pre-plastic, pre-automobile, pre-highway, pre-Walmart, existence entices us.

And another thing: we seem to sometimes perceive the “good”—whatever that is—more clearly there, where the technology doesn’t get in the way. Free of its cords and electric pulses, its clutter, we perceive the “evil” there more sharply, too. And that, again, is a legacy of faerie, I expect. For there, in that world of brilliant color and deep shadow, uncluttered as it is by smokestacks and water towers, we sooner expect to encounter the magic that we crave, from some “other world,” hanging around the bend. Yes, even though we know that magic to be full of peril, unpredictable, and ever unwilling to bend its rules to the self-absorbed. Yes, because somewhere we seem to cling to that old-fashioned idea ...

  

"Fantasy" - according to Tolkien

I find I’m not finished with my musings on Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories.” There’s a lot there worth pondering, especially in a blog like this that would not exist, strictly speaking, were it not for that essay and its author.

In the essay, Tolkien claims that fairy stories offer special gifts to humankind. What they do for us, they do better than anything else. He calls these gifts fantasy, recovery, escape, and consolation.

“Fantasy”—it doesn’t mean for him what you might think.

First, it’s obvious when reading Tolkien’s essay that he’s using the term in a new way. He describes “fantasy” as an almost elfish craft of creating stories that involve the “faerie” realm—or at least magical, non-realistic elements from “faerie.” But—and this is equally important—such stories also maintain an internal consistency or “reality” (or “truth”) within them.

Tolkien is not trying to invent a new “genre” here: he’s trying to revitalize an age-old practice or aspect of human culture—“a right of humanity” I think was his phrase. That “human right” is to create and prize such stories, for adults. In his time, fairy tales had been relegated to children and studied (but not openly enjoyed) by adults. I suspect things haven’t changed that much, except that more adults today would probably admit they enjoy fairy tales. But fairy tales are still, as then, enjoyed by … not everyone.

(Incidentally, very few subscription-based magazines openly seek out original “fairy stories” for publication. Most of those are children’s magazines.)

Fast forward sixty plus years. I think it’s fair to say that, currently, more fantasy novels are being published and read than fairy tales—although (as I’ve discovered) some fairy tale collections score prominently in the rankings, and people who like fairy tales really like them. Ironically, Tolkien acted as midwife to the creation of this genre we call “fantasy.” Well, he had plenty of help from the publishing industry, which saw an opportunity for profits, subsequently realized. The results are staggering. One website dedicated to such things lists almost twenty subgenres under the “fantasy” label, and condescends to include Tolkien in its lists, though not without severe criticism of his Middle Earth novels.

I offer no quibble to the bewildering array of fiction marketed under the label “fantasy,” though my personal preference is for fantasy with links to folktale and myth. (I also like sci-fi, which I experience as a different genre; its roots go back well before Tolkien’s work.) In my own tastes, I’ve obviously been influenced by Tolkien’s. For him, “fantasy” that is not somehow drawing on folktale or myth, set in some form of “faerie,” is a sort of contradiction in terms. But then, as I said, he was talking about a faculty, a human capacity for storytelling that washes and revitalizes the world: not a genre of fiction. And, in fact, Tolkien viewed “fantasy” as high literary art, superior in many respects to what is usually classed as “literary fiction.” His quibble with literary critics runs through various parts of the essay, and is probably familiar to every serious Tolkien fan.

I think it’s fair to say that not all “fantasy” (even on NPR's 100 Best list) is “high literary art,” even when it sells well. The production of books that entertain lots of people and consequently make huge amounts of money … is what it is. But commercial success and high literary art have no intrinsic correlation: a novel can be one or both or neither. Tolkien’s LOTR is obviously both: a pioneering work of stunning imaginative power, realized potential, and rich complexity, with a lingering effect on the reader—and it’s sold many, many copies.

But Tolkien’s epic is “fantasy” because it takes place in “faerie”—of a particular sort, if I can put it that way. And yet, LOTR is a new creation that gathers many leaves from the “tree of tales” and weaves of them a compelling story that makes the reader see the “real world” in a new way. By Tolkien’s terms, then, his own work is “fantasy,” while much that followed in his train is … not so much.

So, if you’ve ever wondered why you like Tolkien, and fairy tales, and some fantasy, but you’re lukewarm about much that sells under the label “fantasy”—well, maybe what you want is “fantasy” of a different kind. Look for “faerie”—tales that tap into the wonder, magic, and mythic landscape of the human imagination.

NOTE: This is the second of three posts on Tolkien's essay. Check out the first and the third.

Except the Queen, by Jane Yolen and Midori Snyder

Now and again I hope to offer a few comments on books I’ve read that seem to me connected to the concept of “sideways-in” fantasy. Today’s post does that. (Warning: This post contains spoilers.)

Image from penguin.com

Except the Queen, a recent (2010) novel by Jane Yolen and Midori Snyder, takes the folktale tradition—with some non-traditional influences—in an interesting direction. First, the lead characters are two low-ranking sister fairies who are banished from the fairy world to the human one, where they appear as old women. However, unbeknown to them, a power struggle is brewing between the fairy Queen and the unseelie host, personified in this tale by a figure called “Redcap.” Second, the setting is today’s urban U.S., where college-aged kids are getting violated in various ways by evil fairies. Third, the real heroine of the story is a girl alienated from her roots, who turns out to be the Queen’s daughter. True to many fantasy novels, the low-ranking lead characters play a vital role in saving the world (at least the fairy one) from some catastrophe.

If you think about this novel in terms of how it handles the folktale tradition, some interesting points emerge. One, the writers have worked hard to bring forward a consistent vision of the fey realm, its workings and (in the part of the tradition from which they draw) its dual nature (good and evil fairy courts, in particular). Their portrayal of the fey realm succeeds insofar as it evokes an almost pagan sensibility. It’s not the only way to think of fairies, but it is potent, frightening, and thoroughly magicked. (Compare, for instance, “Tamlane,” among the darker fairy tales.)

Another point seems obvious: The writers have given serious thought to how this fey realm could be thought to interact with ours. Like many fantasies set in today’s world, things happen in the story that would seriously restructure the world as we know it. This leads to what amounts to an alternate “modern world,” much like fantasy set in the vaguely “Middle Ages” amounts to an alternate “medieval world.” More, the tale takes on an almost apocalyptic feel toward its end. If you don’t care for that sort of thing, then you don’t. But it’s part of the modern fantasy tradition.

In other words, Except the Queen makes innovations within a recognizable tradition—as it should. Its plot—I mean, the story itself and how it unfolds and how it gets resolved—owes more to the fantasy genre (and the novel tradition more generally) than it does to the folktales from which it draws. But, as we might expect from Yolen and Snyder, the novel seems unusually conscious of (and respectful toward) folk traditions about fairies and their magic, frivolity, and potency. It brings these traditions forward and makes something meaningful of them within the narration of the story. That’s the vibrancy, I would argue, at the heart of this fantasy novel.

(Without it, by the way, you would have a fairly customary plot, however interesting: Strayed girl and abused boy meet up with the help of two old meddling eccentric women, and find their roots (for the girl) and end the cycle of abuse (for the boy). That’s what people who classify these things would call a “literary novel.”)

There were times that the novel didn’t work that well for me, places where too many perspectives were present and some themes weren’t as developed as I’d have liked. (Jane Yolen mentions, on her blog, that they cut 10-15,000 words for an editor.) Even so, it was worth reading.


Dealing with fey subjects is never easy, I think, however riotous it seems at first glance. Kudos to Yolen and Snyder for their respectful handling of the tradition in an urban fantasy.

Good and Evil in Fairy Tales - Or, "The Juniper Tree"

This is a huge topic; here’s the tip of the proverbial iceberg that I can see, and why you should maybe care.

The idea to write about this came up when I did my little study, short and flawed as it was, to find out if people are still buying fairy tales in any quantity (see "Do people still read fairy tales?"). What I found was a little surprising: Grimm outsells everybody. The Complete Grimm that Barnes & Noble puts out was ranked at 155 on their top seller lists in early January 2012. No other fairy tale book that I could find even came close to that.

So what’s the lesson there? Could be a lot of things, but I think you have to acknowledge Grimm’s appeal. What does Grimm do well? One thing that, I suspect, rings true is that these particular stories believe in good and evil. I know that’s not fashionable, but it’s true. Let me give one example.

I doesn’t get much starker than in “The Juniper Tree.” The villain, a stepmother who craves her husband’s property for her daughter instead of the dead wife’s son, allows what the story calls an “evil” thought to overpower her and cuts the boy’s head off. As if that’s not bad enough, she manages to get her daughter (whom she presumably loves less than her own skin) to think she (the daughter) killed the boy. Then she cooks the boy in a stew, which the unwitting, good-hearted father devours with a rare appetite.

So this is evil—sharp, well-defined evil. Far-fetched? A little, maybe. But I’ve seen the evening news. Enough said.

Unlike in normal life, this evil stepmother is going to get hers—and how. That’s one thing you know, when you’re reading Grimm. You see all this unfolding with horror and, even though it’s understated, it’s potent. But you know it’s somehow coming out well in the end. And it does.

The sister, poor thing, weeping and hysterical, takes the boy’s bones (removed from the empty stewpot by the stepmother) and buries them under the boy’s dead mother’s favorite juniper tree. Something magical happens—you guessed that, right?—and the boy’s bones vanish, a bird appears, and it flies away and sings a beautiful song, earning itself three strange objects. At least, so the characters in the story think, though the song lyrics are terrible. “My mother murdered me, my father ate of me …”

I won’t go through the whole thing. Cut to the happy ending: the father gets a beautiful gold necklace, the sister gets a beautiful pair of shoes, and the stepmother gets a millstone on her head. The bird goes back to being the boy. The end.

There’s even a little more on this line, but that’s enough to give the gist.

Now, picking up a modern fairy tale, or a modern retelling of a fairy tale, or a modern fantasy novel (or many other kinds of novels), off the shelf, you don’t know two things going in: (1) if there’s going to be a real villain, who’s understandable but still wicked in the old sense of “bad,” “not good”; and (2) if there’s going to be a “happy ending,” in the sense that bad people will get punished and good ones will win through. Actually there’s a third: you don’t know if there’s going to be anybody that’s “good” in the story either; I mean, a hero you can want to live through it and thrive.

Picking up Grimm, you can basically assume (1) and (2) at least, and usually you’ll get (3) into the bargain. These aren’t religious stories; they aren’t “Christian,” for instance. But they are profoundly moral: they believe in right and wrong. And part of the satisfying nature of them is this “right and wrong,” good and evil, punishment and reward, quality.

Could it be that people are reading Grimm because they, too, believe in good and evil, punishment and reward? Seems likely. Crime shows are among the very most popular on television—especially the ones that believe in punishments for evildoers, and vindication for victims. They too are profoundly moral. You might not agree with all of their morals, but they are moral in that sense.

Whereas what could be more disappointing than spending hours reading a thick fantasy novel and finding, at the end, that (1) there wasn’t really any bad guy; or (2) the bad guy wasn’t at all believable; or (3) there wasn’t any character with a shred of integrity or loyalty (they were all bad guys); or (4) there wasn’t a good, satisfying outcome (nobody who deserved it got punished, or won the day)? Grimm will give you most or all of those in just about every three-to-five page story. That translates to hours of satisfying reading.

But, so this won’t get lost in the middle, I want to re-emphasize two points about Grimm. One is that few if any of the heroes are “good” in the sense of being perfect or untouchably moral. Some are tricksters, clever, almost swindlers. Some are just loyal to somebody—a small kind of “goodness” that, however, is very powerful in life. The second point is that the thrill of the stories seems to derive at least partly from how the magic will be involved—sometimes on the dark side, sometimes on the light side, sometimes on both. Strange to say, I can feel my pulse rise even though I know the thing’s going to come out right. Maybe that shows how naïve I am—me and thousands of others.