I was in Priceline, buying last-minute essentials for our trip to the US (oh, didn't I mention? I fly out for a month tomorrow). The "CelebritySlim" weight-loss stuff is right next to the Belgian chocolate.
Yep. That's a winner, right there.
3:19 PM - link to this -
(0) comments
Thursday, September 18, 2008
I've been reading Romanitas by Sophia McDougall. I'm a bit iffy about it. It's not the whole "but there are good reasons why Rome fell" (this being a "the Roman Empire still exists in 2004" story) because I don't care to begin with, and I also think that unless the reasons why it didn't are central to your story then they needn't be included. (Sidebar: I am a little frowny-face that there doesn't seem to have been any degree of philosophical advancement. Technological, yes, but slavery still exists, religion is still Roman and the class system remains. I find this, frankly, difficult to get past.)
But no, my problem is more that I'm 184 pages in (and it's a trade paperback) and I really don't feel like I've had 184 pages of story. It's a big novel, but I'm not sure it's a Big Story - at the moment, following four characters in their very insular concerns about the world, it feels like a very small story.
This has led me to pondering a concept never far from my heart: Fantasy Flab. The example I inevitably use when talking about this concept is Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, and specifically the book where Elayne has a bath for a whole twenty-page chapter. (In reading my own novel, Anthony made a note: "She gets into the bath on page 141. I'm counting.") I suppose, given the selling power and stature of Mr Jordan, I shouldn't be at all surprised that Fantasy Flab is starting to afflict more and more of the genre.
It can be summed up quite simply as: "Does this need to be this long?" Or: "Do we need to know this?"
When I'm giving an editor's report on a novel, invariably my general notes include a paragraph on scene selection and shaping. And however I phrase it in that paragraph, the gist is: Every scene must have a point, preferably more than one. Everything that doesn't serve a point can and should be cut out. The more points you can make every word serve, the tighter and better your writing will be.
Don't get me wrong. In the long writing versus short writing debate (also known as the fat books versus thin books) I stand on the side of the long and the fat. I don't want to read unless it's epic. I prefer to glean the facts from rich narrative than have them told to me succinctly. I see the charm of short writing - the elegance, the stark beauty of it - but I will always prefer the long.
But not that long.
Or rather, I suppose I should say, not long for long's sake. I think reviewers are too fond of phrases like "vividly imagined" and "richly detailed", and they've got the whole fantasy genre thinking that all writing needs fulsome detail. But Jane's trip to the corner store needn't be a whole chapter of vivid, rich step-by-step; it could be a paragraph of sharp-etched prose or, even better, Jane can just start the next scene with a bag of mixed lollies she didn't have before. The art of efficiency isn't dead in fantasy fiction, but it's certainly not being worn thin through overwork either.
The other common appearance in edits that I do is the phrase "Are these details necessary?" in the margins. I am, I admit, a bit ruthless. And as I starting skipping over pages of Romanitas as Marcus sat and thought and paced and ruminated and decided and demonstrably did not move the story forward, I wanted to reach for a pen to write in the margins.
It's a library book. So I scribbled on the internet instead.
3:39 PM - link to this -
(1) comments
Thursday, August 28, 2008
I seem to have developed a fascination with Melbourne's lost railways.
This is rather less romantic than it sounds. Only a small part - the inner-circle city - of Melbourne's suburban rail network is underground, which makes the whole business of "lost railways" rather less Neverwhere and more something Google maps have been extremely helpful with. (Speaking of which, I experienced my first surround-vision streetview on Google maps yesterday. It's possible Google wants to turn the whole world into a first-person shooter. It's possible this will be awesome.)
Let's start at the beginning. Early last week, I ventured out into the slightly-further-out suburbs (this is a big thing for me; I'm very attached to the city) to try and find an Italian and possibly magical cobbler to make me a new pair of boots. This mission successfully discharged, I was skipping happily back down Nicholson Street when I realised I'd just crossed traintracks crossing the road. This perplexed me mightly, as to my right there was a building. The only patch of actual tracks was those that crossed the road; but in either direction, something of a cleared space of park ran.
I started my investigation playing with the Melways, and even there it's quite easy to trace where the railway used to run, from one eastern curve to the corresponding western curve, across the inner-northern suburbs. When I went to the online maps, it was even more obvious in the "satellite" option, a band of parkway and cycling track.
I attributed my early satisfaction with this discovery to the answering of a couple of old, if vague, questions. One, why the signs on the lines out to Clifton Hill say "Clifton Hill Loop", and another, why the western line going north first swings rather wildly out into a curve. Mysteries solved! Excellent work.
Where I went wrong, perhaps, was getting on wikipedia to try and find out some more about the history of the line, and perhaps why it was abandoned (because I think it'd be dead handy these days, but I suppose that's the sort of foresight that's easy to possess some sixty years after the fact). This was a problem, because I found that the article on this railway was part of an "abandoned railways of Melbourne" group. Now I'm fascinated by this "Outer Circle Line" that appears to have once run through the eastern suburbs. And let's not even get started on how interested I've always been in the fact that the St Kilda and Port Melbourne trainlines were converted into tramways.
The most hilarious part of all this is that I live - and have for the past five years lived - across the road from the Railfan Shop. I've been peering at the maps in the window, of Melbourne's past-and-present train network, and correlating places and dates to things I've been looking at. It's possibly only a matter of time before I actually go in, at which point I may spontaneously generate a mackintosh and turn into an old man. Stay tuned!
2:30 PM - link to this -
(0) comments
