Tag: science fiction

Reading Hard Books: Tips for Getting through Tough Prose

I’m currently reading two books that I’m struggling with. The first is East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I was required to read The Grapes of Wrath back in high school; didn’t like it. It was slow and dusty and dry. Still the creepiest ending of all time. Never thought I’d pick up another book by him, but now a book club that I’m participating in with some college friends is reading for the next two months, so here I am reading Steinbeck again. I expected it to be a slog, and it is, but it’s a classic and it’s an experience to put back on my English major hat.

The other book is A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. I hadn’t expected this to be a slog, I have positive memories of the previous book, A Fire Upon the Deep, but now that I’m deep into this second one, I’m remembering that book was also a little dense. Something about Vinge’s writing style makes getting through the words hard, even though I like what’s going on. I think it’s maybe the world building style he has? I think he has an allergy to info dumps and therefore I feel very lost a lot of the time. Sometimes I’m five or ten minutes into a chapter before I figure out that we’ve switched characters and I don’t know where we are. Also, it turns out to be not a sequel but a prequel about one specific character, so I’m not getting more wolf aliens, which is a bummer.

Giving up on books that aren’t right for you (right now, or even ever) is a totally okay thing to do. I’ve been getting better at this. But what do you do when you have a book you really want to read but you’re struggling to make it through the words? I really want to finish both these books, so I’ve been working on ideas. A couple of tips I’m using:

* Discuss it with other people. The book club that’s reading East of Eden had a midway check-in last week. (I was only 1/3 in, but whatever.) I was so glad to find that there were other people in the group struggling with the book. We were able to pin down a few things that make it hard to read (lots of telling, not showing; difficult to believe/like characters), which is very cathartic. But we also talked about why we still wanted to keep going in spite of that. Did you know that East of Eden sold 50,000 copies last year? (How many of those were people assigned to read it? Not clear.) We talked about the symbolism behind the characters we struggled with, which made them a lot easier to understand. I left feeling encouraged to continue with the book. 

* If you don’t have someone to read it with in real life, try looking up critical conversations about the book. Even just reading the Wikipedia article about East of Eden helped me know what a big influence this book really has been on our culture and what Steinbeck was trying to accomplish. Some books might not be for you, but are important enough influences that you want to struggle through them anyway. Doing some research can help you decide whether continuing is worth it, and also help you know what to look for when you’re reading, which can make it more interesting.

* Play the percentages game. This is a trick I learned from long distance running. One of the main preoccupations that keeps me going on a 12 mile long slog is figuring out exactly how much distance I have left. I am constantly calculating what fraction of the way there I am, or exactly how much longer I have. Likewise, both these books are due back at the library soon, so I’ve calculated what percentage of the book I need to read each day to finish on time. I don’t always meet my reading goal for the day, but seeing that percentage on my Kindle or the hours on my audiobook tick slowly down gives me some of the satisfaction that I am not currently getting from the plot line.

Do you push through books that you don’t enjoy reading? Or do you just put them down? Theoretically, I’m in favor of reading difficult books, but I have a hard time actually doing it, especially when the difficulty is in the prose not the plot.

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In other news, yesterday I saw this call for papers on Mormonism and Science Fiction on Facebook and got super excited. I got even more excited when I scrolled through the resources and found my recent series of blog posts listed on there with Michael Colling’s stuff that I read back in college when I wrote the initial paper. This is what it looks like when the internet works! You send stuff out into the void on the tiny niche of things you love, and then you discover that there are other people out there who are interested in this thing. Anyway, I’m really excited to start developing some ideas for this call. In fact, I don’t know how I’m going to narrow down my ideas. (Now my problem is figuring out how I’m going to get back into the BYU library while I’m down there, since there’s a lot of this stuff that isn’t available online.)

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Also, is anyone else devastated that the original creators have left the Avatar: The Last Airbender live-action remake on Netflix? I just can’t imagine this going anywhere good, and Avatar deserves better. I’m also dying of curiosity to find out what the disagreement was about. Ah well.

Writing Lessons from Reading Ray Bradbury

Observations from reading a collection of stories by a science fiction master

Confession: I haven’t read short stories since graduating from college.

This is probably not much of a shock to you. Unless you are a writing professional, you probably don’t read short fiction either. Novels really are the prevailing art of the day. But I’ve been trying to get back into them because they let you see a whole idea very quickly. I will never be able to read as many books as I wish I could, especially since I read so many genres. But with short stories, I can at least get a taste of what an author is like.

A great tool for this has been the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. I recommend it to everyone. It’s like Reading Rainbow but for grownups! And the vast majority of the stories fall into the SFF genre, so I’m getting exposed to a lot of authors I wouldn’t have time for otherwise.

But I set a goal to read one whole collection by a classic SFF author this winter. I wanted to really understand what one author was about without having to spend a year reading their whole backlist. I picked Ray Bradbury merely because I was looking for authors who had written about time travel, and his story “A Sound of Thunder” is, as far as I know, the origin of the butterfly effect as used in fiction.

Well, turns out most of his other stories are not about time travel, but I did enjoy reading A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories by Ray Bradbury. Some of my observations from the collection:

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Turning Darkness into Light: What genre is this and how do I get more of it?

In some ways, I think that my love of Marie Brennan grows out of my love of Brandon Sanderson. The magic in Sanderson’s books is famously logical and scientific. In Mistborn, there are 16 metals and they all have a specific power which is bounded in its possibilities. Warbreaker has a particularly economic magic system where each person has a set amount of magic (“breath”) and in order to get more, you have to literally take someone else’s. In these worlds, you as a reader understand what is possible, the inputs and outputs. The “magic” of the book comes from the clever manipulation of these given tools to solve problems.

Marie Brennan’s series The Memoirs of Lady Trent takes this a step further. Dragons are simply an animal, a creature like any other, and that’s it. There’s no magic, no wizards, only a question of what would it look like if early Enlightenment natural philosophers were studying dragons instead of, well, whatever less cool animals they studied. In spite of the dragons on the covers, the plot of each of the five books is much less about fantastical elements or accomplishing some unknown feat than it is about travelling to an area, doing careful research and observations, perhaps some experiments, and then drawing conclusions from that about the biology and history of the world.

Cover for Turning Darkness into Light

Her new book Turning Darkness into Light is the next logical step. Not only is there no magic or saving the world, but there are hardly any dragons at all, except in the myth that the main scholars are translating. That’s actually the main action of the novel: three people in a room trying to decipher an ancient text and understand the impact it will have on the world. Granted, one of them is a draconean, but his exotic nature matters mostly in his relationship to the text and what he has at stake because of it.

And yet Brennan manages to make this fascinating. Some ways that I think this works:

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NaNo Prep 2019 Recap: Lessons of a First-Time Fiction Writer

  • World-building is hard. I almost wanted to give up and write a realistic novel because it would be so nice to just do some research and come up with a right answer. Deciding on details past the initial idea is super difficult, without relying too much on classic cliches. Kudos to all the scifi/fantasy writers who make this look effortless.
  • If you don’t like the way your book is going, you can change it! And the sooner you scrap what you don’t like, the more time you have to spend on what you do like. I had plotted out a whole war between three nations in my book. Then my book started morphing into a depressing war novel that I didn’t want to write. Saving that plot somewhere else and starting over was a great choice.
  • Plots require both internal and external action. After scrapping the war, I tried to re-outline my book and found that nothing was happening in it. My main character was still making internal progress because a lot of the plotting advice I was following focused on character arcs. But there was nothing to happen on screen while my character worked on her insecurities. I had to swing my planning away from character for a while to focus on having something happen.
  • Novel planning is a balance between planning and pantsing, even if you are otherwise a heavy planner. In other areas of my life, I have a spreadsheet for everything. After a few false starts with more organized plot methods, I ended up using the snowflake method to plot my book. And the steps where you expand the summary of your book (steps 2, 4, & 6) inevitably led me off in weird directions which turned into whole subplots of the book. The difference between plotters and pantsers is when they take these diversions, not if they take them.
  • Don’t give into the first hour anxiety. Everything you do looks terrible in that first hour because it’s hard to get back into it. Stick with it into the second hour and you’ll fall in love again.

Tomorrow is the big day! I’m terrified but excited.

Write About Dragons: Going from Creative Non-fiction to Speculative Fiction

In college, I participated in a life changing study abroad program where we focused on writing personal essays. Our only assignment as we hiked across the Lake District and moors of England was to complete 200 pages of journal writing from which we would then construct a few finished essays. The group continued on into a class the next semester where we workshopped these essays and talked about writing.

And I loved it! I found that essay writing was merely a more structured version of what went on in my head constantly, making meaning out of everyday events, seeing patterns, telling stories. I was already leaning towards it in my first forays into blog writing (part of what got me into the program in the first place). I have continued to compose essays in my head and sometimes on paper through the years.

But then I noticed something: I almost never read creative non-fiction.

Sure, I enjoy an occasional biography. I love Bill Bryson’s work and I read a lot of popular science books. But memoir was never what I reached for, not usually in that backlog of titles sitting on my metaphorical Goodreads shelf. When I realized this, I started to force myself to read more books like what I thought I would write someday, but it never ceased to be a chore.

What did appear on my shelves, almost unbidden, perhaps summoned by magic, were science fiction and fantasy books. When I first started reading independently, I picked up A Wrinkle in Time, the Wizard of Oz series, and the Chronicles of Narnia. After reading The Giver in fourth grade, I reread it almost every year until I graduated from high school. I picked up Ender’s Game and Dealing with Dragons in middle school, read everything by Tamora Piece and Anne McCaffery in high school. Not even to mention Harry Potter, which goes without saying for my generation.

Since I grew up in a family of nerds, I didn’t realize that speculative fiction was not what everyone read until I started taking my English major courses in college. When I realized the academic disdain for fantasy, I was baffled. To me, it was the default genre. Why read a mystery when you could read a mystery with dragons? Why read a romance when you could read a romance with magic?

And yet, when I thought of my own writing career, I never considered writing what I really loved reading. Well, that’s untrue to say. I wrote some fan fiction in high school, as one does, but I found writing about real things so much easier. Creative non-fiction curates real events and then gives them meaning. I did this almost without thought in my daily life, so essay writing was merely pinning down my internal dialogue and subjecting it to reason.

Fiction, on the other hand, involves the creation of the events themselves, and in speculative fiction, that goes double since you must create the whole world, its history, and sometimes new laws of physics. Coming up with characters and plots has always been difficult for me. I was always shy about acting as a kid, and though I read about fantastic worlds, I never pretended they were real, never made up imaginary friends. My childhood imaginary worlds consisted mostly of making maps and currency, two aspects that seemed much safer somehow.

Part of this was the fear of looking ridiculous, of having my ideas be derivative or simple. Yet science fiction and fantasy are the community I love, the people I’d want to meet and the things I’d want to see. So off I march into the dark, leaving what I know how to do behind and trying something else.

I’m think some of the skills that creative non-fiction taught me can transfer over, like finding the internal meaning in external events. Every story is about characters’ need to grow and change.

These ones just involve dragons.