February 2007

On Writing Craft: Balancing the Unsettled Beast
by Elizabeth Bear
www.elizabethbear.com

Elizabeth Bear was born on a Wednesday, but is not a believer in prophecy. She is the author of a number of science fiction and fantasy novels — the most recent being Blood and Iron and Carnival — and a John W. Campbell and Locus Award recipient. She lives in Connecticut with a cat who, fortunately for the fate of the world, does not have thumbs.

Time and again, I see a set of critical responses to genre work which seem to me reflexive rather than considered, and I would like to take this opportunity to explore them. There is a perception in our genre that the pretty stuff — beauty of language, craftsmanship, metaphor — somehow distracts from the serious business of getting the metal to fly. And I find that I can't agree, that I delight in the good prose as much as in the strong narratives — and the lack of one can destroy my enjoyment of the other. There's an aesthetic in SFF (more SF than fantasy) of "transparent" prose, where "transparent" is a vaguely defined term subject to a great deal of argument. Often it means workmanlike (which I find anything but transparent, personally) and sometimes it means craftsmanlike.

In other words, the myth is that fiction can be either beautifully written or excitingly plotted, but not both.

What is true is: it is not easy to do either well, and doing both well simultaneously is a double challenge. Science fiction/fantasy/speculative fiction is a chimera — onto the body of a pulp dragon, as it were, is grafted the lion's head of literary technique and the claws and scorpion sting of social commentary. It is a mixed-up monster, and sometimes — if I may elaborate on what's becoming a somewhat chimerical metaphor in turn — the stitches on the Frankensteinian construct show.

(If you ever want to fluster a hard SF writer, by the way, praise her prose style or narrative voice. She'll blink at you like you just grew a third head.)

The pulp roots of the genre, in other words, which privilege exciting adventure narratives, are engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the literary values of the New Wave. It is my contention that out of that tension arises some pretty fine art.

So, I won't deny that plot and beauty are not always found hand in hand. But, given my own experience as a writer, I suspect this is because most of us find one easier to do than the other, and we learn pretty early in this business to play to our strengths. We won't please everyone; the trick to surviving as a fictioneer is to find one's audience (those persons who are in sympathy to what one is good at or what one is interested in talking about) and satisfy their expectations and desires.

Also, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that writing is too hard to do well. It's a juggling act, and a balancing act, and one is working with limited space and resources (and there's the necessity of maintaining pacing), and every decision one makes, as a writer, means that several other possibilities can no longer be explored. And then, as intimated above, there is the issue of this thing not being easy. And that the more things one tries to do well simultaneously, the harder it gets.

So we are expected to maintain a cracking plot, excellent characterization, shiny new sensawunda ideas, fabulous worldbuilding — and now, on top of that, add lucent prose and literary merit, for the love of Mike? While hitting a deadline every nine months so we don't lose our spot in the catalogue?

Inconceivable!

...okay, not a small objective by any means, and I'm honestly not sure it's a goal many people can meet. (I find it more than a little terrifying to consider.)

We need all these skills to write well. And yet, there are those aesthetics — plot, prose, prose, plot — at war. The end result, if one leans too heavily on the dichtomy, is a lovely but dull meditation, or conversely a novel which is more narrative-driven but obscurely disappointing in that it does not reward re-reading. It feels shallow, without undercurrents.

I think the ideal goal is to do everything well, and the realistic compromise is to do it all to the best of one's ability. We're none of us perfect, I suspect, but more of us could manage not to settle.