Dissection the third; "The Man Who Bridged The Mist."

"The Man The Man Who Bridged the Mist" is third on my list of recognized shorts from The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2012 that I'm attempting to dissect. I'm seeking what the author did right, so as to know how to fix what’s wrong with my own work.

I'm not happy with this dissection; too much by example and too little about the author's choices, but I need to finish this and move on to other projects.

For each story, I try to answer the following questions to help me in my own work:

Why is the story good; why might it have been awarded/bought.

How does author: 

- do character/alien descriptions

- put the reader in the protagonist's skin 

- evoke emotional truth/reader emotion

- depict character emotion

- create mood

- handle EDACE (Eric Witchey's analysis tool, which I'm employing in a truncated fashion)

"The Man Who Bridged the Mist" by Kij Johnson was originally published in Asimov's, October-November. 

Analysis epiphany

I asked Eric Witchey to check if my use of his EDACE was acceptable. (He said it was). He noted that I should ensure my analysis of other works was useful to me in my own writing. (Actually, what he said was a bit more complicated and far more articulate; that's my oversimplification.)

During the correspondence I stumbled over an old epiphany.

I quote examples because they let me "see" the images I took from the story, and  in my head those images answer the question I'm asking. But it doesn't make the answer clear to a reader, who cannot see into my head. (Thank your lucky stars for dodging that fugly chaotic sight). 

So I'm having the same problem here as I'm having in my fiction, especially my shorts. I can "see" what I'm describing but the readers can't.  I haven't given readers the right words, or enough of the right words, on the page.  That doesn't mean I'll need more words -- I must pick carefully what I describe and how. It's a grand reminder why analysis of others' work is so important and useful in improving one's own writing. Thank you, Eric!

So, for instance, in "Mulberry Boys," the author's verb choices make George's predicament seem more immediate and compelling; active present tense verbs help put and keep the reader in George’s skin. Her vocabulary choices for his dialogue and internal narrative underscore the reader’s belief in his age, mood, lack of education and reliance upon himself and the forest. Her choices for Phillip's dialogue do the same for his education, mood, values. She relies more on adjectives to describe him, however, or rather as she has George describe him.

Also, what's not there: George's physical description is irrelevant to the story, so it's not there. (Though I was bumped near the end, when he was physically so much stronger than Phillips; my mental image was less burly and more wiry.) The author only describes the things essential to the story: bits that give us Phillips' status and wealth relative to George, George's skills, Phillips' skills, the forest's mood, details of John Barn that show what's been done to him, the surgical tools from George's point of view, the mulberry leaves, the ruined and clean silk,  the roaring river.

Mulberry Boys; Story dissection number two

Number two in a series of story dissection for my own edification. (Probably unnecessary spoiler alert; don't go further until you've read the stories if you're going to. And you should). For each story, I want to answer the following questions to help me in my own work:

Why is the story good or why might it have been awarded/bought.

How does author: 

- do character/alien descriptions

- put the reader in the protagonist's skin 

- evoke emotional truth/reader emotion

- depict character emotion

- create mood

- handle EDACE (Eric Witchey's analysis tool, which I'm employing in a truncated fashion)

"Mulberry Boys" by Margo Lanagan, originally published in Blood and Other Cravings, is the second in my totally subjective list from  The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2012, edited by Rich Horton.

Reading to learn; 2012's best and "Ghostweight."

I'm not learning enough from just reading; I need to figure out what the authors are doing that is working so well. And perhaps start to use some of those techniques and skills in my own writing. So I'm starting some posts about what I've read this winter and spring. These are mostly for me, especially since I try to take apart what I've read significantly, so it will spoil the books or short stories for anyone who hasn't read them. 

I begin with The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2012, edited by Rich Horton. 

There are nearly 30 stories in the collection. I needed a place to start, so I used a totally subjective criteria;  stories I remembered solely from the title, sorted in order of impact (how long the story stuck with me, how deeply the premise/idea/story affected me). 

This is a combination of how well the title fit with my interpretation of the story (I might eventually remember the story, but the title didn't bring it to mind) and how well the remembered story lived in this reader. 

This initial list is what I'll start with, one story at a time, but I'll probably add to it as I go through remaining eighteen and realize I liked some of them better, just didn't remember them from the title alone. 

• "Ghostweight" by Yoon Ha Lee, originally published in (opi) Clarkesworld, January.
• "Mulberry Boys" by Margo Lanagan, opi Blood and Other Cravings.  
• "The Man Who Bridged the Mist" by Kij Johnson, opi Asimov's, October-November.  
• "The Adakian Eagle" by Bradley Denton, opi Down These Strange Streets.  
• "The Summer People" by Kelly Link, opi Tin House, Fall; Steampunk!  
• "The Sandal-Bride" by Genevieve Valentine, opi Fantasy, March.  
• "The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland, for a Little While" by Catherynne M. Valente opi Tor.com, July 27. 
• "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" by E. Lily Yu, opi Clarkesworld, April. 
• "The Choice" by Paul McAuley opi Asimov's, February.
• "Choose Your Own Adventure" by Kat Howard, opi Fantasy, April.
• "My Chivalric Fiasco" by George Saunders, opi Harper's, September.  

ADDED:
Other stories from the collection that I want to dissect but whose titles didn't remind me of the story:

• "The Silver Wind" by Nina Allan, opi Interzone, March-April.
• "Rampion" by Alexandra Duncan, opi F&SF, May-June.

 For each story, I want to answer the following questions, some of which focus on areas I'm having difficulty with in my own work:

Why is the story good or why might it have been awarded/bought.

How does author: 

- do character/alien descriptions
- put the reader inside the protagonist's skin
- evoke emotional truth/reader emotion
- depict character emotion
- create mood
- handle EDACE (Eric Witchey's analysis tool, which I'm employing a truncated version of to better understand)

 I began with "Ghostweight," which has really stuck with me. I think it's the strongest story in the collection.

Starting Over, Clawing Sunward

This blog has been composting awhile. My father had a stroke about a week after the last entry (late April 2012) and died on Memorial Day. Two weeks after his funeral my "other mother" was diagnosed as terminal. She lives with me now. It's been ... a year.

And this is an incredibly bad spot to pick back up again, but the muse never picks a good time. If the muse is involved in crises of confidence. I need to work my way through this somehow and writing has always been my tool.

I am so sure I can write most of the time that on some days it approaches, or probably appears to others to be, arrogance. As insecure a human being as I am, I find that amusing, but -- communicating via the written word is the one thing I can do. It's also the one thing I never put much weight on. It came so easily to me I was certain anyone could do it. I was assured over and over again that it wasn't true, that I had a valuable skill. I pursued it because nothing else worked for me.

But so very many people can and do write well. And so many of them write so much better than I do.

Mid-week, I went from "I know what I'm doing and I am good at it" to "I have no idea what even makes a story work or what people consider a story anymore. I'm not just a hack, I can't learn to become a better writer and I should just quit."

A swift hard fall from a certain height, with that stop at the end crushing my battered self-confidence and causing collateral damage to my heart. I hurt today in ways I had thought I'd conquered. And it's embarrassing.  Back-of-hand-to-forehead, "Look at me, I'm an anguished writer!" melodrama-queen embarrassing.

That judgmental twit in my head is leaning back with a quirked eyebrow, saying, "Really? That's the best you can do?" Even my crisis of confidence isn't adequate.

Hating one's one work happens to every writer, they say. I'd thought myself semi-immune to that drama because I spent so many years hating everything about myself  for other reasons. Surely this one thing was safe?

Apparently not.

I know enough to not wipe my hard drive, or burn my stories, or make anguished statements about how I'll never write again, although for awhile last night all of those things sounded like a good idea sure to be applauded by anybody who'd read any of my stuff. That too will pass.

So I'm already recovering a bit, and I know I'll come back to myself again. I also know it's probably an indication that I'm about to make a breakthrough of some sort, but that concept seems so far-fetched right now as to feel delusional.

Learning to move on is part of the learning curve, however, and this is about lessons that recur. And self-doubt and self-denigration are things that I certainly can expect to deal with from time to time.

Onward.

Incomplete reading list from Second Quarter 2013

 Holy Diver by Gra´ Linnaea (Daily Science Fiction)

The Silver Witch by Tara Calaby (DSF)

Cradle Song by Brenda Cannon Kalt (DSF)

Where Memory Holds a Seat by Nina Kiriki Hoffman (DSF)

The Key to Everything by Nina Kiriki Hoffman (DSF)

An Exodus of Wings by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam (DSF)

Ecdysis by Nicole Cipri (The Journal of Unlikely Entomology)

Spiders, Centipedes, & Holes by Cat Rambo (TJOUE)

The Space Between by Lew Andrada (TJOUE)

Silent Drops of Crimson and Gold Rain by Pam L. Wallace (TJOUE)

The Lonely Barricade at Dawn by Jesse William Olson (TJOUE)

Jeanette's Feast by Michelle Ann King (TJOUE)

B. By Nicola Belte (TJOUE)

Collateral Memory by Sabrina Vourvoulias (Strange Horizons)

Longfin's Daughters by O.J. Cade (Strange Horizons)

Mongoose by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear (Clarkesworld)

Dead Men Walking by Paul McAuley (CW)

Free-Fall by Graham Templeton (CW)

This is Why We Jump by Jacob Clifton (CW)

The Urashima Effect by E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld)

Baggage Check by Shay Darrach (Crossed Genres)

How the Jellyfish Got its Spine Back by Lucia Starkey (CG)

Second Skin by AJ Fitzwater (CG)

Where That Morning Sun Goes Down By Tim L. Williams (Ellery Queen)

The Locked House of Pythagoras by Soji Shimada (EQ)

Ghost Writer by Val McDermid (EQ)

The Road Les Traveled by Harley Mazuk (EQ)

Wild Justice by Sandi Ault (EQ)

Sugar by Steve Hockensmith (EQ)

A Case of Mis-Identity by Jennifer Reeve (EQ)

The Weight by Steve Hamilton (EQ)

The Lethal Leeteg by Hayford Peirce (EQ)

MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN by Joshua Foer (nonfiction)

The Faery Handbag by Kelly Link

The Wrong Grave by Kelly Link

Deborah Ross on connection and solitude

The View from the Top experiment and related stories

Living with the Gap by Eric M. Witchey

Mirages by Eric M. Witchey (Writer's Magazine)

The Bird Country by K.M. Ferebee, Shimmer mag

Reading and re-reading and writing

I need to read, both in the genres I write in and outside them. Just read; fill my head with other people's works and ideas and styles and themes. I need the escape that other writers can provide, to be in their reality for awhile, to get off my own frenetic mental hampster wheel. (You needed that earworm, didn't you?)

I need to refill my well creatively with other worlds and art, and the cheapest and easiest way to do that is to read.

I chug books. Wednesday night around 9 p.m. I picked up Sara Paretsky's Ghost Country and finished it around 2 a.m.*; my hardcover copy is 386 pages.

I hear other people talking about re-reading books and am generally nonplussed. Also uneasy; I know I should re-read, especially give how quickly I gulp fiction. How else can I truly appreciate the work that the author has done, the careful phrasing, the way a character has been developed, a setting drawn? But my motivation for reading is to find out what happened. Once I know how things turn out, it's hard to invest the time to go back. The escape I get from fiction is never as strong, never as visceral the second time. I'm an emotional reader; I sink into the action and absorb the feelings and experiences of the characters. (Which is why horror is generally just right out).


When I read a book without a strong plot line, like Angélica Gorodischer’s fantastic Kalpa Imperial, I do much better to read it aloud in chunks; otherwise I have trouble and put it down.


I've been doing so much re-reading of my own stuff while revising that the last thing I want to do is revisit somebody's else's. I might embed it too deeply. I'm terrified I'll use other people's phrases, ideas, concepts, plots without recognizing them. Daily, that self-doubt revisits. This phrase that is so familiar now -- am I sure it's really mine?  It's too smooth, too clean, I must have stolen it without realizing it. Could I have read it somewhere else?

And yet, to come full circle, when I am tied in knots about my own plots and wording, reading someone else's work -- particularly writing that is beautifully crafted, tightly plotted, and/or sensually evocative -- takes me out of my self-absorption and refills me with delight for the written word. That enthusiasm and appreciation in turn motivates me to become a better writer myself.

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*  I sometimes wonder how authors who spend years on a novel feel when they hear readers say things like that. I know I despair at times -- I'm spending days on this scene, if I count all the revisions, probably weeks, and a reader is going to blip through this in minutes. Why can't I revise it faster?

More books to read

More reading suggestions, mostly weird fiction (and a precursor to Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Alejo Carpentier).