World in the Satin Bag

Pointless Plot Elements, Convenience, and Fantasy

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I was reading something the other day and one of the things that I disliked about it was how the author had gone about plotting his or her novel. Each element to the plot (each action and reaction) seemed too convenient, as if the author had intentionally done those things just so he or she would have an excuse to put two characters together by chapter four. While this may occur quite often in fantasy or any sort of fiction with a discernible plot, what bothered me the most was how obvious the story was about its convenience. This seems like a problem that is very common in fantasy (and, to a lesser extent, science fiction). Too many writers seem to rely on convenience rather than logic or intelligent plotting. For the record, I do not profess to be an expert on how to plot, but am speaking here primarily as a reader; and, as a writer, it is making me very aware of my own novels and stories, so much so that I have started to wonder whether or not there are elements of convenience in my own work (there are). I can’t say I know how to deal with such issues, but it seems to me that the reasonable thing to do is to avoid moments where it is obvious that you are plotting by convenience. If you say “Oh, well if I just do this, then I can put these characters together, and then everything I want to do can be done,” then it seems to me that you’re dealing with convenience. Worst yet, it makes no sense to a reader why you wouldn’t just put those characters together in the first place if you wanted them there anyway. There are factors that make all this obvious; rapidity is one of them. The quicker you try to make your plot happen, the more clear it is to the reader that that is what you are trying to do. The nasty critical side of me wants to point out that this is amateurish; I’ve done it, and where I see it I know that I have done something terrible. Having said all of this, I have no advice whatsoever on how to avoid it. Like I said, I still do it from time to time. The only thing I can think to do is to ask yourself at every plot turn if you’re using convenience rather than logic. If you are, then you probably should think of something else. If you know that someone is going to say “this is terribly convenient,” then it doesn’t make sense to continue going in that direction. But, I want your opinions on this. How many of you have experience this either in your reading or your writing? Let me know in the comments!

World in the Satin Bag

Video Found: Ray Bradbury on Writing

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While this is a short video, he offers some amazing advice, not just about writing persistently, but about what makes for a great story, in his opinion. You also get to see him in his boxer shorts, which, for anyone obsessed with his work, is probably a wonderful experience indeed (click the read more to see the video):

World in the Satin Bag

Book Shopping Etiquette

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I recently returned from an enormous book sale in the Gainesville area and have a few thoughts on the issue of book shopping etiquette, since clearly nobody at the sale had any idea what etiquette was. So, I have compiled this list of good book shopping etiquette in crowded browsing situations: 1. Form a directional order to sectional browsing. Everyone should go the same direction, aisle by aisle, to facilitate proper browsing for multiple people. Having twelve people coming from all directions doesn’t help.2. Don’t push, crowd, or rush past people who are clearly waiting politely for someone else to move. Honestly.3. Say “excuse me” if you need to get by for some reason. It’s common decency. We used to have that once, when we were still British and knew how to queue.4. Allow people to switch places with you if you are going particularly slow so that they can get to look at the stuff on the other side of you. Snails gum up the works.5. Don’t sit down in the middle of an aisle or near a shelf and start looking through the books you’ve already picked, especially when it’s clear that other people want to browse there. Jackass.6. Don’t take other people’s books. You’d think this would go without saying, but apparently people do this, and I’ll have you know that I will carry a fork from this day on especially for those folks.7. Let the folks who are trying to rapidly restock the shelves do exactly that. At a big sale like the one I went to, where things aren’t alphabetical, those folks rushing in with new boxes of books are just trying to keep the stock fresh. That’s good for everyone, including you, Mr. Book Fanatic.8. Do not bring your infant child to a book sale that you know is going to be crowded and full of boxes with sharp corners. While I may be more than willing to give you leeway, others with more rabid book buying tastes have no qualms bashing your kid in the face with a box or an elbow.9. Let old people go first. They’re likely not looking for what you want anyway, and they’re old.10. Wear deodorant. Seriously.11. Brush your teeth. Other people have to smell your breath in cramped quarters, and someone might kill you as a result… I’m sure there are other good rules, but I’ll let you all think of them. For now, that’s what I’ve got!

World in the Satin Bag

I Know What Un-American Is

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Do you? Well, if you don’t, maybe you should consider the following: 1. Sending U.S. soldiers into Iraq to die under the spoken claim that a) Iraq was a direct threat to the United States (false) and b) Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (also false). What exactly are they defending in Iraq? You should also consider whether or not there is such a thing as freedom in the forceful overthrow of an oppressive government and the forced installation of a supposedly free democracy, but, hey, no need to think back to the history of colonialism and imperialism.2. Worse still is the fact that injured Iraq and Afghanistan vets return home to find themselves deprived of what should be excellent and necessary medical aid to get them back on their feet so they can at least become productive members of society, rather than dissolve into the den of homelessness and internalized terror. Heaven forbid that our soldiers might want a little gratitude from us for not dying in battle.3. Disenfranchising tens of thousands of voters, over and over, who were either predominately black or Democrat by using illegal methods such as caging voters and the like, and then refusing to prosecute people caught doing such things, time and time again.4. Stopping the recount of votes some 170,000 short and ceasing all investigation into serious issues of voter fraud and illegal activities in key states, despite realistic concerns from voters and representatives about the vote itself.5. Stopping independent investigative committees from looking into the 9/11 terrorist attacks.6. Illegally wire-tapping hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans.7. Taking days to get significant quantities of support into New Orleans to evacuate thousands of people, some of which died of dehydration or other ailments as a result of being exposed to sewage, etc.8. Imprisoning hundreds of people in Guantanamo Bay for years, without being charged for any crimes or given trials.9. Torturing said people and then lying about doing it, and then, when the truth comes out, saying that it was for the best, despite being against the Geneva Convention, which we signed, and our own laws about the treatment of POWs, without any conscious thought about how such action might affect the treatment of our own soldiers in the future.10. Denying someone the right to be with their dying loved ones based on a prejudiced (and illegal) belief.11. Denying people of “opposite” races to marry because it might cause problems for their future children (also illegal, by the way).12. Denying people the right to marry someone of the same sex based on an unconstitutional inclusion of Biblical law. (To those five states with marriage for homosexuals: may you forever prosper above those states that trade in hatred.)13. Killing people based on a) sexual orientation, b) race, or c) political orientation. And that’s just a few of the un-american things that have happened in the last ten years. Imagine what this list would look like if I included the previous thirty… That is all.

World in the Satin Bag

Science Fiction is Not Immortal

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Having spoken of the non-death of science fiction, it occurs to me that I should also talk about the would-be-death of the genre. Because, unlike general fiction (or “literary” fiction, if you want to call it that, though that would be unfair), science fiction does have a limited lifespan. To be fair to SF, that lifespan is a long one, since the inevitable death of SF cannot occur until one of two things becomes true (and I have mentioned these before): a) we are incapable of imagining the future any longer; or b) the future ceases to exist. I don’t know how either of these possibilities will ever worm their way into existence short of the apocalypse descending upon us, since, after all, the physical end of human history as we know it would constitute a complete absence of the future. But then, SF wouldn’t exist because there would be nobody there to think about it. So that is not a possible solution to the problematic nature of SF’s mortality. Instead, and I think I have touched on this at some previous point, science fiction will cease to exist in the first instance when some measure of hope (or the utopian ideal of such a thing) no longer occupies us as a bulk entity of fleshy masses, when we literally cease concerning ourselves with the present’s pursuit of the future. How? Perhaps through the creation of a utopian state, as much as one can exist, in which the needs of each man and woman are attended to, in some fashion or another. It’s hard to say what could produce the incapability of imagining the future, but when that occurs, SF dies. In the second instance, however, the future must cease to exist because the limitations of the future itself are as mortal as science fiction. The future is not indefinite, but is replaceable, recycling itself over and over, in a cycle that is finite. It is not a perpetual motion machine, but a machine with a long, slow, drawn out cease-ment-of-living. The future, thus, ends for mankind when there is nowhere else to go. Perhaps that is at the end of life as we know it, or at the end of the universe (the collapsing of the energy that created us all, which would then restart the cycle, restart time like a battery). More than likely, it is at the point in humanity’s inevitably long existence in which we simply have nowhere else to go. Imagine that, if you will: after all those centuries, we come to a point where technology cannot progress, where what is around the corner is little more than the same thing that we saw yesterday, and nothing we do changes anything in a significant manner whatsoever (on a global or galactic scale). That is where science fiction dies. But, a simpler approach, one that is less “philosophical,” if you will, is to try to think about the place we will eventually be in, where science fiction cannot possibly offer us anything else. If we already have space ships and aliens and AI and robots and all of those imaginative constructs, then, really, where else is there to go? Science fiction simply cannot exist in that sort of environment. It will cease to be speculative and forever become the present, the every-day. We’ll stop calling it “science fiction” and, instead, shove it in with all those mainstream and “literary” novels. That is, of course, if literature can survive the distant future. And that’s all I have to say on that. What do you think?

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