Review: Elements of Fiction Writing - Characters & Viewpoint

Elements of Fiction Writing - Characters & Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'd already heard much of the advice in this book, in part because Mary Robinette Kowal of the Writing Excuses podcast is a fan and refers to it often. It was still worth reading, as it takes the reader through a number of important considerations about characterisation and allied subjects: not only how to use the techniques, but when and why. I highlighted a great many useful and well-considered passages.

Card's basic view of writing is that in telling stories, we are influencing people to expand their understanding of the human condition; that by presenting fictional characters we can help our readers understand them more than they have ever understood a real person, and to understand themselves. This involves making the reader care about, believe in, and comprehend the story that you're telling and the characters in it. In order to do this effectively, we need to understand the techniques of characterisation.

Along the way, he considers the question of the epic hero versus the ordinary person; the comic character and the serious character; the hero and the villain; character change; voice; and viewpoint. Throughout, he explains the techniques in terms of the likely effect on the reader.

The Kindle edition has been scanned from a print copy, but competently, and there are only a few small errors (such as a missing blank line after the sentence "This is what a line break looks like").

All in all, worthy to stand alongside its series-mates Scene and Structure and Beginnings, Middles & Ends.



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Review: Magonia

Magonia by Maria Dahvana Headley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Come for the wonderful voice (and attitude) of Aza Ray, the teenage narrator. Stay for a suspenseful plot, vivid characters, and fantastical worldbuilding.

This was one of those books that, while still partway through the sample, I knew I wanted to buy. It's difficult to create a truly original character voice, but this author pulls it off with Aza Ray. She even pulls it off again with Jason, Aza's best friend, though his voice is less distinctive (this shouldn't be taken as a criticism; most voices are less distinctive than Aza's).

There are all too few books that reflect the experience of chronic illness, what it's like not only for those who have it but for their friends and family. This book captures that experience wonderfully. Aza is by no means resigned to her fate, but she's realistic about it. She snarks entertainingly about her situation, but she's not in denial, or detached. Even if the plot had been less than it was, that alone would have got five stars from me. And Jason's devoted love for her, not hindered, but counterpointed, by his own issues, comes through beautifully.

On top of that, add a plot with skyships (invisible to our civilization, but raiding it under cover of storms), sung magic, bird people, bird familiars that nest in adepts' bodies, a corrupt flying city, proletarian rebellion, and a raid on the world seed repository in Spitzbergen. Most of those elements by themselves are not new or groundbreaking, but all together, and combined with the characters, they're wonderful.

Be it noted also: for the first time in my memory, I'm giving a HarperCollins book my "well-edited" tag. This is a tribute to the author, I'm sure, much as I'd like to think that that publisher has finally started taking copy editing seriously. I spotted only one typo, which is extremely rare (my average is a couple of dozen, across both trad-pub and indie books).

This is what YA should be like. In fact, this is what fiction should be like.

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My Top 15 Books for 2015

Following on from my Top 14 Books for 2014, here's this year's post.

First, here's my Goodreads graphic. It's slightly incorrect, because I recorded one book on New Year's Day which I'd finished the previous day, and even though I changed the date the graphic won't update. So it should read 101 books, not 100. The extra book (John Varley's Persistence of Vision) got four stars.

Another good year, in which I read no fewer than 11 books that won five stars from me, out of my total of 101. Last year, only nine books out of 104 made it to five stars.

A five-star book is one that I enjoyed very much and which I also consider particularly well done. One or other of those things will get a book four stars, and this year I awarded four stars to 68 books (70 in 2014).

Three stars from me means that the book was either basically competent but only moderately entertaining for me, or basically entertaining despite not being all that competent, or somewhere in the range between the two. I had 19 three-star books this year, compared with 23 in 2014.

Thanks to continued good filtering, I again kept the number of two-star books down to two, the same as last year. Two stars means significant issues severely impacted my enjoyment of the book. I seldom finish a book like that. One was in a free box set I picked up, and lacked a middle; the other I bought, in part, based on an Amazon review that said there were few editing errors. (That reviewer was mistaken. There were at least 90.)

There's one book I didn't rate: In Memory, an anthology in honour of the late Sir Terry Pratchett and in aid of Alzheimer's research. That's because I was a contributor, and rating it would be against my policy. Other people have rated it, though, and done so very highly; it was the highest-rated book I read this year.

Let's go to the rankings. The top four four-star books first.

15. Ithaka Rising, L.J. Cohen. YA space opera with a brain and a heart. Sequel to Derelict, which took spot number 13 in last year's roundup. Full review.

14. Orconomics, J. Zachary Pike. Combines satire on current economic and political issues with a sword-and-sorcery/D&D setting, and makes it work. Full review.

13. The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison. Beautiful and intricate, the opposite of an action thriller, and filled with names that become confusing at times, but for me an enjoyable read. Full review.

12. Ten Thousand Devils, S.A. Hunt. The adjective "towering" might have been coined for Hunt's genre-mashing Outlaw King series, and this volume has all the virtues of the earlier ones. Full review.

Now the five-star books, starting with three nonfiction volumes I read in order to improve my own writing:

11. Creating Short Fiction, Damon Knight. The wisdom of a long-time writer and writing instructor on the special strengths and requirements of the short form. Full review.

10. Beginnings, Middles and Ends, Nancy Kress. Clearly laid out, and full of insights into the process of writing both novels and short stories. Full review.

9. Scene and Structure, Jack M. Bickham. A classic of writing instruction, it takes the reader clearly and thoroughly through how to structure a novel that will make sense and keep up the tension right to the end. Full review.

8. A Sip of Fear, Brian Rush. Brian died in December, a sad loss to contemporary fantasy, as this book abundantly proves. Spirituality seamlessly combines with a compelling plot. Full review.

7. Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie. Impeccably written, with masterfully drawn characters in a fascinating and thought-provoking setting, its only fault is a slight lack of clarity about the protagonist's goals. Full review.

6. The Martian, Andy Weir. A classic "clever engineer" SF story told with humour, verve and heart. Full review.

5. Three Parts Dead, Max Gladstone. Commercial lawyer/adepts investigate the murder of a god through a DDOS attack. The sheer audacity of the ideas is fascinating, and the plot lives up to them. Full review.

4. Book of Iron, Elizabeth Bear. More audacious ideas, grand characters and tense adventures from a master wordcrafter; like Jirel of Joiry by way of Roger Zelazny. Full review.

3. Hot Lead, Cold Iron, Ari Marmell. A flawless blend of noir detective with urban fantasy. Full review.

2. The Alloy of Law, Brandon Sanderson. An exuberant mashup of supers and Western with a touch of steampunk, this is also a sequel to the Mistborn trilogy - itself a glorious reimagining of the epic fantasy, blended with postapocalyptic and (again) supers. Full review.

1. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman. Nobody else writes quite as resonantly as Gaiman, turning childhood memories into the stuff of myth and legend. Full review.


Apparently I like genre mashups, and also books that refer to metallurgy in the title. Who knew?

More seriously, what I love is original, audacious, exuberant ideas, well executed in a gripping story with well-intentioned characters who I care about, and backed up by highly competent prose. If you can write like that, I don't care what your title is.

I look forward to reading many more such books in 2016.

Review: The Persistence of Vision

The Persistence of Vision by John Varley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Though the ebook version is somewhat marred by uncorrected errors in the scanning and digitising process, this collection of Varley stories from the 1970s effectively showcases the author's considerable writing skill and imagination. Most of the stories are set in the same milieu, first seen in his novel The Ophiuchi Hotline, in which aliens have depopulated Earth and humans only survive elsewhere in the solar system. This seems to be primarily an excuse to exclude Earth from the setting and keep everything on the Moon and other planets; in most of the stories, neither Earth nor the past apocalyptic event are even referred to.

The exception is the title novella, which I'd read before (I forget where; it was a long time ago). It's set in a rapidly unravelling USA, but again, the unravelling is largely an excuse to get the main character away from the cities and land him up at a commune in Taos, New Mexico, one founded by people who were born deaf and blind because of the 1964 rubella epidemic.

Fair warning: SF in the 1970s tended to be a bit obsessed with sex; I thought of this obsession as "Heinleinesque" until I considered it more carefully, and realised that Robert Silverberg and Theodore Sturgeon were just the same. Varley is another example, and we have a couple of stories in this collection where the main characters end up having sex with their own clones, and several in which sex partners either are, or look like, what we would consider minors. From today's perspective, this comes off as simultaneously creepy and naive, rather than progressive.

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Review: Steal the Sky

Steal the Sky by Megan E. O'Keefe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed Megan O'Keefe's story in last year's Writers of the Future Volume 30, and I enjoyed this, a better-than-average steampunk novel. It wasn't without some issues that are common in steampunk, but it was well told, the plot made sense and was well constructed, the characters weren't idiots, and it worked well as a story.

One huge problem with the steampunk genre is that very few people writing it stay within their vocabulary - they often use words that are either not quite the right words, or else are definitely the wrong words, for what they mean. I read an ARC of this book via NetGalley (in exchange for an honest review), so I don't know which of the numerous examples of this problem will be corrected by the copy editor; hopefully most of them, and all of the comma splices. (As a former editor myself, though, I know that no editor catches everything, and it's better if the writer doesn't commit the errors in the first place.)

Another feature of steampunk which could be seen as a flaw is thin worldbuilding. Often, this hinges on one, essentially magical, substance, frequently something to do with flight, which can also function as a McGuffin to drive the plot and a deus ex machina any time the plot threatens to go off the rails. In Steal the Sky, this role is taken by selium, or sel, a lighter-than-air substance (kind of a fluid, kind of a gas) which can be detected and manipulated by "sel-sensitives" with what amount to psychic powers. The idea is interestingly explored, though, and I didn't feel that the author pushed it too far or used it to paper over the cracks too often.

Something that a lot of steampunk books fail to do, and which this one succeeds at, is capturing the fight against social injustice that was so much a feature of the real, historical 19th century. All too often, the main characters are privileged, and the story becomes a clone of an imperialist Boys' Own Paper or Girls' Own Paper adventure, with the fight being against villains who want to disturb the status quo. Here, while one of the characters is a down-on-his-luck nobleman from the oldest colonial family on the conquered continent, he is fighting on the side of the oppressed, and the book's sympathies are clearly with the underdog and against the powerful.

The plot moves along well, with plenty of tension and action, but leaves time and space for some character development. Things are grim, but not grimdark or despairing. Overall, a good effort, and if the author can overcome her tendency to use incorrect homonyms and to comma splice, I think she has a bright future in the field.

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Review: The Dragon Beshrewed (Illustrated)

The Dragon Beshrewed (Illustrated) by M.M. Stauffer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a book that not only needs, but deserves, better copy editing, since it's engaging, well told and has some freshness about it. It's not just the same old stupid Chosen One plot recycled for the Nth time. It's dark, without being grimdark. It has a genuinely strong female protagonist, who thinks and solves problems and takes brave, decisive action and doesn't make stupid decisions that require that she be rescued by a man. (Her male sidekicks do help, but she is definitely the protagonist.)

Overall, I enjoyed it, and that's what kept me reading, despite the many editing issues (all the usual ones, plus a homonym error that's new to me: "codec" where it should be "codex"). However, because those issues occurred frequently and were a constant distraction, it didn't sell me on getting the sequel.

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Review: Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew

Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've long admired Ursula Le Guin's writing, which manages to be simultaneously literary-not-pretentious and genre-not-cliched. So as part of my project of reading books on writing craft to improve my own writing, I picked up this little volume.

I'll admit that I have a bad habit of not doing the exercises, so I didn't get as much out of it as I perhaps could have. I applaud the general approach, though, of looking at the basic elements of writing (definitely including getting grammar and punctuation correct), isolating them, and working through exercises to see what the effect is. Only by understanding our tools and the effects they produce do we become capable craftspeople.

I also appreciated the acknowledgement that plot is not the only way to get a story, and conflict is not the only way to get a plot. Here's Ms Le Guin:

"I define story as a narrative of events (external or psychological) which moves through time or implies the passage of time, and which involves change.
"I define plot as a form of story which uses action as its mode, usually in the form of conflict, and which closely and intricately connects one act to another, usually through a causal chain, ending in a climax.
"Climax is one kind of pleasure; plot is one kind of story. A strong, shapely plot is a pleasure in itself. It can be reused generation after generation. It provides an armature for narrative that beginning writers may find invaluable.
"But most serious modern fictions can't be reduced to a plot, or retold without fatal loss except in their own words."

Did I learn a great deal from this book, as an intermediate writer trying to reach the next level? No. But I'm glad I read it, because it helped me think through (again) some important ideas about writing, and I would definitely recommend it.

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