Posts made in May, 2012

• Let’s Keep It This Way!

  How children's fantasy influences adult fantasy.
  

  Carol Wolf continues her quest to explore the imaginative bounds of story

  The first way in which children’s fantasy influences adult fantasy is that it acts as a gateway drug for readers, who as they grow up desire more sophisticated fantasy to read. At the same time children’s fantasy causes little story-telling fantasy readers to grow up telling fantasy stories which develop from children’s to adult fantasy.

  One of the worst influences on modern literature is the academic study of it. Whole departments of PhDs and PhD candidates, poring over stuff that writers were hacking out to amuse their friends, or support themselves and their families, excavating for the deepest meanings, lauding and deifying the writers, has changed our culture’s view of fiction. From Aphra Behn to Mrs. Gaskell, fiction was railed at from the pulpits and condemned in the parlor as a form of entertainment that could rot your brain or subvert your moral tone (and where do we hear this nowadays? Gods help us, in fifty more years I’ll bet there will be academics studying video games). Now, because of academia, fiction is taken very seriously indeed.

  Children’s fantasy, on the other hand, still enjoys its status of being overlooked. Fairy tales, magical adventures, encounters with talking ducks and flying trains, are obviously not to be taken seriously. This gives the story-teller a world where nothing she writes is held to any special account, where she can try anything, and if it doesn’t quite work, well, it’s just a fairy tale, it’s just a fantasy, you know, for children. The talking duck is dumb, and trains can fly. Amidst this benign neglect, where there’s no place to fall, (I mean really, a talking duck?) the writer is given scope and depth to explore wonders without fear or hesitation.

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• From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)

  How children's fantasy influences adult fantasy.

  Music connoisseurs will recognize the title of this post from a Dave Edmunds song.  Very much a high school thing for me–back when WNEW-FM in New York was a rock station, Edmunds was a staple with tunes like ‘Girls Talk’, ‘Crawlin’ From The Wreckage’ and, of course, ‘From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)’.  That song is about a small town girl who dreams of big things, and achieves them through a combination of good looks, wildness and bold action.  Kind of like the influence of children’s fantasy on adult fantasy, if you think about it: small, pretty ideas that grow and, through exposure to life and the wide, wide world, become fully realized things.

  See, I think children’s fantasy and adult fantasy have a relationship to each other that’s inverse to the real world: children’s fantasy gives birth to adult fantasy.  I don’t think fantasy is necessarily inspired by fantasy stories (although, as a kid, my reading included Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle books and the first few Chronicles of Narnia).  I think fantasy is a distillation of ideas and experiences from reading, movies and life, and the dreams that come from figuring out how to escape these influences or how to better them.  It starts early in life and becomes more refined as we get older, in the way some of us developed a taste for whiskey or scotch. (more…)

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• It’s okay for kids’ books to be fantasy – why not adults?

  How children's fantasy influences adult fantasy.

  One of my first Saturday jobs was in the local library, and the best days were those on which new books arrived and would need to be opened and labelled and put out on the shelves. Unashamedly, I loved reading all the children’s picture books. Not only were they beautiful objects in themselves, but the illustrations conjured up such marvellous worlds, be it of the ocean (Rainbow Fish), small night-thief cats (Slinky Malinki, one of literature’s most excellent cats) or bigger cats (The Tiger Who Came To Tea). Those pictures are still ingrained on my mind. Of course, the wonderful thing about reading is that as you progress through the library shelves, the fonts grow smaller but the illustrations don’t disappear, they just move to inside your head.

  Growing up I was a voracious reader. 25 Summer Book Challenge? Check, and the rest. (Now if I manage 25 books in a year, it’s an achievement, and the tottering to-read pile grows ever more precarious.) There was the era of adventure stories, the Secret Sevens and the Nancy Drews; of fantastical stories, Ethel the Worst Witch and Narnia (though I was disappointed when I discovered Aslan was more-than-a-lion) and later there were brilliant young adult writers to discover: David Almond, Malorie Blackman, Garth Nix and Eoin Colfer. David Almond’s Skellig is a wonderful example of finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. The alternative reality of Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses is blisteringly heartbreaking. I love the Artemis Fowl books for their criminal mastermind antihero; the perfect antidote to Harry Potter (I read all of those too). And I’ve previously spent an entire post talking about my admiration of Philip Pullman.

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• Child Wonder vs. Adult Realization: FIST FIGHT!

  How children's fantasy influences adult fantasy.
  

  Paul Tobin

  Having once been a child myself, and happily suffering through continual relapses, it’s obvious that my adult writings are influenced by the children’s fantasy stories that I once read, and that I continue to read. That said, I’ve never been a big believer in the saying of the “child’s sense of wonder.” I won’t deny that children have a sense of wonder regarding their world and the possibilities it contains, but the saying seems to deny adults our own sense of wonder, as if I and other adults were supposed to pack up our sense of wonder as soon as we grew hair on our genitalia or crashed our first car and realized we could not, sadly, fix it either by leaping back in time or by using nothing more than the exquisite power of our minds.

  Well… I refuse to pack up my sense of wonder. I won’t do that. I will hold my breath and pass out unless I’m told that it’s okay to be an adult and still make up stories in my mind. The stories that I make up might have a good deal more adult themes (my rescued alien princesses would be disappointed with a mere kiss) but the template for other worlds, for greater powers, for noble warriors and witches and so forth, it all stems from the scribblings I was doing way back when I was supposed to be studying geography, or when I was at the library, wondering what to read next, what world to explore. And children’s literature has so many worlds… so many universes where we can walk through wardrobes or land our spaceships or drink a shrinking potion and suddenly we get to play an array of new games with fantastical creatures.

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• Green As the Day Is Long

  Envy: Do you experience it as a writer? If so, how do you handle it?

  I’ll just put it out there. I will never be accused of being organized. In fact, “disorganized” is still probably too generous. Anti-organized? Whatever. I often have good intentions about implementing tools and systems to try to be better on top of things, to empower myself to create plans more solid than rice paper. But the road to hell and all that. I always half-ass it, and half a system is almost worse than none at all. Because it fools you into thinking you have a handle on things, when in truth, you’re just as hopelessly clueless as usual, only you’ve also wasted some valuable time putting together a useless and deceptive half-system that could have been spent doing something fun.

  “What does any of this have to do with writer envy, you rambling, tangent-loving jackelope?” you might be tempted to ask.

  Well, I’ll tell you, though I’m not crazy about your tone. I knew at one point the theme for one of the weeks here at the Bazaar was going to be envy. I swear I did. I read an email that spelled it out before I submitted my first post months ago. And, in typical Salyards fashion (to be fair, some distant relatives out there are probably exceptionally organized, so I can’t really hide behind the surname—it’s really just my fashion), I somehow forgot. Actually, what really happened is I convinced myself the topic didn’t make the cut. Which is more ironic than you know, since when the Night Bazaar guru, Liz, was soliciting ideas and asking us to brainstorm, “writer envy” was one of the ones I popped off.
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• Who Wants to Know?

  Envy: Do you experience it as a writer? If so, how do you handle it?
  

  Carol Wolf is the author of Summoning and Binding, Books One and Two of the Moon Wolf Saga

  “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
  I all alone beweep my outcast state,
  And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
  And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
  Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
  Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
  Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope . . . ”

  One of the most courageous pieces of work I’ve ever read is an essay on envy by Kathy Chetkovich. I agree that emotional integrity is, in the end, the true measure of how good a writer you can be. Only so far as you can tell the truth to yourself can you put it into your work, and the weight of truth in the work is the measure of its worth. At the same time, we don’t write fiction to display our selves. And about one’s meanest aspects a decent reticence is best.

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• Envy: a few small steps from friendly competition

  Envy: Do you experience it as a writer? If so, how do you handle it?
  

  Bradley P. Beaulieu

  Do I experience envy? Um, need you ask? Of course I experience envy. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

  First of all, for me, it’s inevitable. Most wouldn’t know it from talking to me, but I’m very competitive. Strangely enough, this may stem from not playing enough organized sports when I was a kid. I played, you know, neighborhood stuff, and in school gym class and such, but not much beyond that. I did, however, get a high from getting good scores on tests. I wasn’t a die-hard when it came to studying, but man I loved getting A’s.

  That translated to my adult life, not so much in my career in software programming, where things are hard to measure, but certainly here in the writing world, where it seems things are all about measuring. At least they are nowadays. Back before Bookscan, who knew what other writers’ numbers were like? You were lucky to get royalty statements that made a lick of sense for your own books, much less someone else’s. But now? Well, you hear about sales being made. You know, the Publishers Weekly nice deals, very nice deals, major deals, and so on. And now you can see (in stark relief) such things as Amazon rankings and number of reviews on any number of sites. You can look at their Facebook followers, Twitter followers, Google+, Pinterest, and on and on and on.

  It’s numbing to the point that if you allow yourself to fall into the pit of envy, you may never come out again. That’s one of the things I had to be careful about early on. I’m a numbers guy. I wanted to know how well my books were (or weren’t) doing. So I would compare and analyze and try to rank myself in some way. In the end, it’s is a pretty useless exercise. It fed my “want to know now” urges, but little else. It was without substance, like trying to fill yourself up on lettuce alone.

  And yet I began this post by saying that envy isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you experience envy, I think it’s important to channel that into something else, and for me, it’s trying to make my work better. But let me first differentiate between a couple kinds of envy. The first (and most self-possessed) is the kind in which you look at someone’s success and it feels (to you, anyway) unwarranted. Maybe you don’t like the person. Maybe you don’t respect their work. Maybe you feel like they’ve jumped the line. It’s very much like the feeling I get when I see a movie franchise like the Transformers succeed the way it has when movies like (picking a recent favorite out of my hat) Melancholia hardly got any play at all. There’s no use in paying attention to this sort of envy. In fact, it’s counterproductive. It saps energy, and it takes your eye off the prize. (more…)

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• If The 7 Deadly Sins Were Australian Icons, Envy Would Be A Boomerang

  Envy: Do you experience it as a writer? If so, how do you handle it?

  I’m not sure why anyone wastes time and energy with Envy.  Envy is the least fun of the 7 Deadly Sins. 

  Wrath?  On occasion, a righteous ass-kicking is what’s needed to resolve a seemingly intractable situation.  Pride?  That’s self-esteem run amuck.  Who doesn’t like to feel good about themselves?  Sloth, Lust, Gluttony–do I even need to describe how much fun each of these can be?  Even Greed implies taking action, going out to get what you want.  But Envy?  Envy is a whiner whose misery boomerangs back on its perpetrator with no tangible benefit.  Envy is like Greed and Sloth had a kid–all the unrequited desire of the former, with the inertia of the latter.   It’s, without question, the most useless of the sins.  It’s so…small and petty.  I just don’t see the point. 

  I can’t remember a time where I experienced Envy as a writer, or in pretty much any other aspect of my life.  I’m too selfish. (more…)

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• The ones I wish I’d written

  Envy: Do you experience it as a writer? If so, how do you handle it?

  There’s that feeling you get when you finish a really amazing book and you think, damn that was good. And there’s that feeling you get when you finish a really amazing book and you think, damn that was good and I wish I’d written it.

  The answer to this week’s question: do you suffer envy as a writer, is of course an overwhelming YES. Who doesn’t? If there are writers out there who don’t suffer envy, I’m envious of them! There’s nothing worse than that feeling where you finish something and think, oh great. Why do I bother, because clearly I’ll never be able to write like that. Or where the writer appears to do effortlessly the things you struggle most with. So you sit around feeling morose for a while and maybe go and inflict your misery on some unfortunate relative or friend (But I will never be that good! you cry. Never! If they’ve got any sense they’ll send you away with a mandate to write at least 1,000 words by nightfall, preferably in silence.)

  Conversely, however, I think envy also spurs you on to write better. True, you may never attain the virtuoso, chameleon style of Margaret Atwood, or the maddeningly rich yet absolutely precise vocabulary of Cormac McCarthy, but you can at least try to do what you do that bit better.

  Coming back to the first point, I think there is a difference between the books you read and simply admire for their brilliance and the books you read and wish you had written. It doesn’t mean one is better than the other. The latter, for me, is the books that tap into something very close to your heart. Maybe it’s a subject you feel passionately about, or a particular character who resonates with you, or the depiction of a world you’d love to inhabit. (more…)

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• The 500 pound gorilla named Envy

  Envy: Do you experience it as a writer? If so, how do you handle it?
  

  Paul Tobin

  The topic here is envy. Jealousy. The green monster that’s not the Hulk, but which can smash everything apart just as easily. Wikipedia notes that envy is also called invidiousness, which I believe is a word no one has ever used, and if they have used it, then they have a vocabulary of which I am envious. The philosopher Bertrand Russel said that envy is one of the most potent causes of unhappiness, while the poet Philip James Bailey said, “Envy’s a coal comes hissing hot from hell,” which makes me think that, despite how Bailey died in 1902, he would still be an excellent choice to be the head lyricist for InvidiouS & M, my new heavy metal band:

  So, have I ever experienced envy as a writer? Of course. I’ve had plenty of people envy what I’ve done, and I’ve certainly envied the writings of other authors. It’s simply not possible to avoid wishing to have a series of books as popular as the Harry Potter novels, and to bank a billion dollars for the efforts of gaining worldwide love and acclaim. Hell, I’m even envious of Stephanie Meyer… not that I think the Twilight novels are any great works of fiction, but

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