Storyteller's Rulebook: Let Absurdity Clash with Meaning

“A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is beloved by nerds everywhere, many of whom, like myself, are atheists, and indeed Adams defined himself as a “radical atheist”, but he followed that up with “I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.”  Indeed, let’s look at that prodding.  First we get this exchange, about the Babel fish:

• Now, it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some have chosen to see it as the final proof of the NON-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:
• “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
• “But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that You exist, and so therefore, by Your own arguments, You don't. QED”
• “Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn't thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
• “Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

But of course, God is right there having this conversation, isn’t he? He doesn’t stand up to logical scrutiny, so he must go, but only after he created the universe: “In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very unhappy and has widely been regarded as a bad move.”

So, setting aside what we know of Adams, the theism of the book is ambiguous. What about Christianity specifically? Right there on the first page, we get praise for Jesus...

• And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change…

Then there’s the issue of the larger quest. We later find out that humankind has a greater purpose. It has been determined that the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is “42”, but then what’s the question? It turns out that Earth were invented to discover that question. In other words, life on Earth is a search for meaning.

By the fourth book, Earth has been recreated, and presumably that search is still going on, but the characters get distracted by another quest, to find “God’s final message to his creation”. The fact that they even seek this out is telling. It turns out the message is “WE APOLOGISE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.” So we get the sense that Adams, and by extension, his characters, are really deists: God created us, and gave us a purpose, but then we banished him with a “puff of logic” and now have to search out his meaning on our own, using the scraps he’s left behind.

We love these books for their absurdity, but Adams’s grappling with God give them a lot of their power. Absurdity is more powerful if it clashes with meaning.

The Meddler: Making Arthur a More Satisfying Hero in “Hitchhiker’s Guide”

Arthur Dent in “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” starts off as a very effective hero. We get everything we need in the first few pages to believe, care, and invest:

• Believe: We get odd little specifics about his life, like the fact that his beloved house has oddly unpleasing windows. This makes us say, “oh, I’ve never heard that detail before, but it sounds like a real concern, so this must be a real person.”
• Care: Arthur realizes the house is about to be torn down, and he’s been treated in a way that makes us burn with indignation.
• Invest: Arthur then acts heroically to save the house, lying down in the mud to block the bulldozers. This is a hero willing to do what it takes.

So we’re off to the races, right? But we quickly have problems:

• Arthur is, it seems at first, the only survivor of the destruction of the planet Earth, which is a perfect set-up for a hero, but one key reason is missing: Why? What did he do differently than everybody else?
• The bigger problem is that Arthur then suddenly becomes very passive for most of the book. Once Ford sweeps back into his life, Arthur just stumbles after him, mouth agape, for basically the rest of the book (and the next two) passively taking in information and complying with Ford’s orders semi-competently.

So let’s meddle with it.  Two minor fixes:

• We never have a sense of how Arthur and Ford became friends. I think that it would greatly strengthen Arthur as a hero to show a moment in the past where he did something nice for Ford. That nice action would then result in Ford saving his life someday, making Arthur more the hero of his own story.
• It’s okay for Arthur to be trailing behind Ford for a lot of the book if he comes into his own in the final quarter, and the book kind of does that by having the rest of the gang get sidelined while Arthur meets with Slartibartfast the planet-builder, but that meeting is too inconsequential and Arthur doesn’t say much. Give Arthur a little moment where he convinces Slartibartfast to recreate the Earth just as it was (so that we can keep trying to find the question to the answer of Life, the Universe, and Everything).

The movie did a slightly better job with this: Giving Arthur a moment in his restored home before he decides to travel the galaxy some more, but ultimately it, too, was unsatisfying.

In some ways, this series is like “A Song of Ice and Fire”: a writer who seemed allergic to satisfying endings kept stretching out the story into sequel after sequel. In this case, the fears of Martin fans were realized: Adams died young after writing a particularly unsatisfying installment, before he could provide the happy ending Arthur deserved. Martin fans, beware!

Happy Memorial Day

Writer’s Digest published my book, so they might be biased, but it’s nice to get a bit of a shout-out for the work we do here. (Yes, the irony is that I’m using a review praising me for posting often as an excuse not to post today.)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: A Masterclass in Comedy (And One Pet Peeve)

“A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is one of the funniest books ever written and any writer can learn a lot from it, whether you aim to be a comedic writer or simply sprinkle some comedy into any kind of book. In many ways, the humor is particularly British, but that’s no reason that anybody can’t emulate it. Let’s look at some of Douglas Adams’s tricks:

• It’s always funny to try to be precise about imprecise things: “four windows set in the front of a size and proportion which more or less exactly failed to please the eye” (Of course, “42” is the ultimate example of this.)
• A list of mundane things with something bizarre in the middle that the hero fails to register: “At eight o’clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn’t feel very good. He woke up blearily, got up, wandered blearily round his room, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and stomped off to the bathroom to wash.”
• Connected to that, obliviousness to danger is always funny. In that case it was unconscious, but it can also be willful: Ford finds Arthur blocking bulldozers and says, “look, are you busy?”
• It’s always good to use inherently funny words: “squelching”, “cajoleries”
• Alliteration is always good for creating comedic verbal rhythms: “Thereafter, staggering semiparalytic down the night streets, he would often ask passing policemen if they knew the way to Betelgeuse”

And there’s a lot more to learn here. But there’s also one example of a pet peeve of mine. Adams mostly gets away with it, but I’ve been really tripped up on examples of this in comedic script and novels I’ve given notes on. This is the final dialogue of the opening chapter:

• “Myself I’d trust him to the end of the Earth,” said Ford.
• “Oh yes,” said Arthur, “and how far’s that?”
• “About twelve minutes away,” said Ford, “come on, I need a drink.”

The problem, of course, is that Arthur would never ask that question. He’s only asking it to set up the punchline. This is hoary sitcom stuff (I suppose that before that they would have called it hoary vaudeville stuff.) Can you get away with it? A few times, maybe, but the effort shows, whereas most of Adams’s stuff seem effortlessly witty. Avoid heavy lifting.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Extend the Trend Lines

Nothing makes one feel older that rereading a science-fiction book from one’s youth only to find that it’s come true in the meantime.

I had previously read “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” at age nine (I was precocious) back in 1984. At the time, the notion of an electronic book with a leather cover (my ipad today has a leather cover) was pretty strange, as was the notion of that device containing a nearly-infinite crowd-sourced encyclopedia that covered almost every conceivable topic, which was filled with errors, but nonetheless good enough to eclipse the popularity of traditional encyclopedias.

But it all came true. I’ve always said that Wikipedia is one of the most utopian aspects of our modern world, and this seems to confirm it.

And so I think to myself, “Boy, if I could go back in time and tell my younger self that this book would come true in his lifetime, wouldn’t he be surprised?” And then I realize, “No, he wouldn’t be.” If I were to go back and tell my 1984 self, “Hey, can you believe that the world is really different in 2018?” my 9-year old self would say, “Well I should fucking hope so—that’s the distant future! Do you live on the moon?” Then I would have to say, “Well no…In fact, we’ve abandoned manned space travel…But we all have computers in our pockets!”

(This is another area where Adams seems prescient. Indeed, one of the most dated aspects of the era in which it was written is that digital watches still seemed cool at the time. He correctly looked at that development and said “Um, we shouldn’t be so impressed by these. Better stuff is coming.”)

This book is far from hard science-fiction, but in creating the character of Ford Prefect, Adams wanted to show that he was cooler than anyone on Earth, so he invented something that made him cool: the guide. And now we’re all that cool. And that’s pretty neat.

In 1979, post-apocalyptic fiction was all the rage, and this book certainly fits into that category, but thankfully it turned out to be wrong about that, so far. You could say that the world is still tottering on the edge of apocalypse, but so far only the cool tech from this book has come to pass. At least I’d have a little good news to report to my 1984 self.

(I was going to illustrate this with a still from the movie, only to discover another thing the movie messed up: The book doesn’t have “Don’t Panic” on the cover!  This was the best I was able to find, though it hardly fits the description in the book.)

The Annotation Project: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

See, I told you we’d get around to it! This is a very funny book. One reason that it got pushed pack was that I’d never finished the series, so I decided to finally read all four of the original books (everyone including Adams was imploring me to skip the belated fifth one, so I did.) I’ll have more to say about it! Download the doc here.

Straying from the Party Line: Showing Some Compassion in “Beloved”

Generally speaking, you want to make things hard for your characters. Everything feels better if it’s earned. Readers want to watch your characters struggle to overcome their problems so that they can feel like they’re learning problem-solving methods for their own lives, and so that they can feel like they too have suffered along with your characters and earned the ending.

But there are exceptions. “Beloved” is a novel about characters who have endured an unfathomable amount of suffering. Sethe has a long story of whippings and rapes as a slave, all before she had to cut her own baby’s throat, only to have that baby’s ghost violently haunt her house and drive both her boys away. That’s a lot.

What sort of mind could even conceive of that much horror to inflict on one character? Is Morrison, like the last author we looked at, a sadist, torturing her character and the reader, preying on our masochism? No, she’s not. Morrison overflows with empathy and sympathy for her poor beleaguered characters.

This novel begins in a way that risks feeling too easy. Lonely Sethe comes home one day to discover a nearly perfect man simply waiting for her on her porch. A guy she always liked from back in the day who now just wants to love her, make love to her, and exorcise her ghost problem. True, he is later seduced by the ghost when she returns as a grown woman, but in the end he is happily reunited with Sethe.

You have to love your characters, and that means that you have to cut them a break sometimes. The reader is overwhelmed by the horrors of Sethe’s life, and we want her to have this happiness. Finding a great man so easily would be unsatisfying if this was just a romance, but there’s so much more going on here, and the ease of this romance is a nice counterpoint to everything else.

And of course, because these people are so damaged, there still is a certain amount of conflict. She begins by asking “Is that you?” and he responds, “What’s left,” which is a great beginning for a romance story. Soon we get:

• “That's some of what I came for. The rest is you. But if all the truth be known, I go anywhere these days. Anywhere they let me sit down.”
• “You looking good.”
• “Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.” He looked at her and the word “bad” took on another meaning.
• Sethe smiled. This is the way they were--had been. All of the Sweet Home men, before and after Halle, treated her to a mild brotherly flirtation, so subtle you had to scratch for it.

Morrison is still making her heroine scratch for it, under all the layers of scar tissue. Both sides earnestly deflect the other’s compliments, feeling too traumatized to ever be desirablie. She’s giving her heroine a big-hearted gift, but nothing is easy for characters this scarred.

People enjoy reading “Beloved”. It was very popular on Oprah’s Book Club. It’s draining and painful, but also heart-swelling and powerful. Morrison isn’t saying, “The slaves had to suffer and therefore I will make you suffer.”  The text has horrors and rewards, as most stories should.

Rulebook Casefile: The Power of Objects and Kitchens in “Beloved”

You can marvel over just about any paragraph from “Beloved”, but let’s look at this one:

• The fat white circles of dough lined the pan in rows. Once more Sethe touched a wet forefinger to the stove. She opened the oven door and slid the pan of biscuits in. As she raised up from the heat she felt Paul D behind her and his hands under her breasts. She straightened up and knew, but could not feel, that his cheek was pressing into the branches of her chokecherry tree.

I’ve written before, both here and in my book, about the value of placing scenes in kitchens. In this case we have a semi sex-scene in a kitchen, and because of the stove we already have a wet finger and rising heat before the man has crossed the room. The kitchen does half the work of getting characters where they want to go.

(And speaking of food, can we talk about how great the word “chokecherry” is? Sethe’s back has been whipped so badly that the scar tissue resembles a tree, but not just any generic tree, a very specific chokecherry tree. When Morrison encountered this word, you know she fell in love with it and cherished it until she found a devastating place to deploy it.)

At the end of the chapter, Sethe goes upstairs with Paul D, leaving her dejected daughter Denver downstairs:

• Now her mother was upstairs with the man who had gotten rid of the only other company she had. Denver dipped a bit of bread into the jelly. Slowly, methodically, miserably she ate it.

Denver isn’t just sitting there feeling miserable, she’s got some food in her hand and she’s eating it slowly, methodically, and miserably. The object allows Morrison to describe a state that is physically visible, instead of her inner turmoil. Seeing is believing. Behavior is better than internal description.  Put objects in their hands.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Humanize the Inhuman

It’s hard to conceive of the horrors of slavery. The word that keeps coming to mind is “inhuman”. Inhuman cruelty leading to inhuman suffering. But as writers it’s our job to humanize. If the slavers were characters in “Beloved”, Morrison would have to humanize their cruelty. They’re not, which is just as well, which means she can focus on the victims. She has to humanize their inhuman suffering.

The only way that Denver and her mother-in-law Baby Suggs have survived is by cauterizing their wounds. This is literally true for Denver, who has lost all feeling in her back from her whippings, but Baby Suggs, too, has developed some calluses.

• “You lucky. You got three left. Three pulling at your skirts and just one raising hell from the other side. Be thankful, why don't you? I had eight. Every one of them gone away from me. Four taken, four chased, and all, I expect, worrying somebody's house into evil.” Baby Suggs rubbed her eyebrows.
• “My first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that’s all I remember.”
• “That’s all you let yourself remember,” Sethe had told her

They have blocked off their feelings, but it’s Morrison’s job to pick at those scabs, rip off the dead skin, and expose their pain to us in a way that we’ll feel it. How do you make the audience understand what it’s like?

Losing eight kids is unimaginable to modern readers, but you have to make us imagine it. The first mistake would be to have Baby Suggs scream about the injustice of it, which is of course something she would have stopped doing long ago. Morrison does the opposite: summons up our shock and horror by showing how casual Baby Suggs is about it. Our horror is in inverse proportion to hers.

But then Morrison shows how important unique-but-universal details are. If she said of her firstborn, “All I remember of her is her smile,” we would gape at the horror of that loss, but we wouldn’t really feel it. Instead, Morrison says “All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread”. This is a detail I’ve never heard used in a story before, nor in real life, but it feels totally real in a universal way. It feels so real, and so it makes the suffering so real.

The inhuman has become human. A writer’s most powerful tool is specificity.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Authority Goes a Long Way

“Beloved” is a great ghost story, a great family story, and, just as important, a vital story about the legacy of slavery. Crucially, Morrison could not have more authority to tell this story. When she dedicates her book to the 60 million who are estimated to have been killed in the middle passage, she’s not only tapping into her blackness, but the power of her depictions of racial injustice in her three previous novels, which established her as the ideal writer for this topic. When Morrison turned her attention to the 19th century, everyone was eager to hear what she would have to say.  The result was a Great American Novel.

But what if you lack that sort of authority?

I’ve been asked to read two books by white people about slavery. The first was a real heartbreaker. When “We Need Diverse Books” was rising, a published author, who was a white southern man, was asked by his publisher to write something to something set in the Civil War about race. They knew he was a great writer who could handle it.

But while he was writing it, the tide of public opinion shifted to “Own Voices”, with extreme scrutiny on white writers writing about race (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.) The publisher was in a bad position: They had requested this book, and the writer had really knocked it out of the park with a beautifully written book, but now they were worried about publishing it.

So they sent it out to sensitivity readers, but they also sent it out to me to see if I could help make sure all of the characters, black and white, were fully humanized. The writer liked my notes, so he paid me for a second round after revisions, and I was really impressed by his dedication to making his novel better and more sensitive.

But he was never able to convince the publisher to publish it. They thought it was great, but they were afraid of Twitter. They shelved it.

I inevitably kept this experience in mind when I got a later manuscript about slavery, this one from an unpublished author. I couldn’t guess from her name, so I felt compelled to ask up front if she was white or black. She responded with the worst possible answer: She was white, but she too had experienced oppression. I told her flat out to never say that to anybody else! Nevertheless, I could tell that she was genuine and I was eager to give her novel an unbiased reading.

Her novel was also very good but I worried about several aspects. To pick one example, the family had an exceptionally kind master who liberated them. This wasn’t typical of the era by any means, and a white writer could be accused of choosing this story out of an urge to show that slavery wasn’t so bad (though that wasn’t at all her intent). Ultimately, I gave her a lot of notes to help revise the (already very good) text, as I do with everyone, but I felt I had to warn the writer that she was very unlikely to find a publisher.

In any type of writing, authority goes a long way. This is one reason to “write what your know”: nobody can question your right to write it. Morrison writes with devastating authority. Of course, in theory, anybody can write about anything if they do enough research and write it well enough. But that theory is being tested.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Literary Doesn’t Have to Mean Hide-n-Seek

We’ve done a lot of popular fiction, so I wanted to do something “literary”, but something that most people have read. I chose “Beloved”, but I’ve got a problem: It’s not a good example of a “difficult” book, if that’s what I was looking for. Let’s look at the remarkable opening paragraph:

• 124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old--as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the door sill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once--the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn't have a number then, because Cincinnati didn't stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them.

Morrison is taking full advantage of her omniscient POV to just tell us everything we could want to know about her novel, right up front. We have a genre (horror), a subgenre (haunted house), a setting (124 Bluestone Road outside Cincinatti), a villain (the ghost baby, who is so far unnamed), two heroes (Sethe and her daughter Denver), a description of the rest of the family and what happened to them (except the unmentioned father), and most importantly, the dramatic question: Can Sethe and Denver survive the spiteful wrath of the ghost? And we’re off to the races!

Not exactly difficult to read, is it? And yet the book could not have a more literary reputation, having won the Nobel prize and many more. I’ll have to find another example of a tough nut to crack!

Literary fiction doesn’t have to play hide-n-seek. There’s a place for difficult fiction, but it doesn’t have an exclusive claim to greatness. That’s a great opening paragraph, no matter what your aspirations are.

The Annotation Project: Beloved

Hey guys, I was going to do Hitchhiker’s Guide next, but I didn’t want to do two nerdy-white-guy books in a row, so instead I figured we should look at our first really literary book, stamped with a Nobel and every other prize (but don’t worry it’s still a spooky genre story, too.) It’s hard not to love this book. It’s the oldest one we’ve done, but the style is still very modern. I’ll have lots more to say about it in forthcoming posts. Update: Here’s a downloadable Doc.

Guest Appearance on the Story Makers Podcast!

Hi guys, I’m almost ready with new material, but in the meantime, check me out on the Story Makers podcast, which has no overlap with my last podcast appearance, so it’s worth a listen. We talk about “A Game of Thrones” a lot and the reader’s experience of “pleasurable masochism” while reading it. We also range over lots of fun topics, like irony and why we tell each other stories. I also mention the next book we’ll be doing (though I think it won’t actually be next.)

What Book Should We Do Next?

Okay guys, we’ve done five books, which means that it’s time to add them to the sidebar alongside our movies and TV pilots. Check ‘em out →

So, what next? I’ll take a little break then try to come back with some new books before summer. What books have people read? What books would you like to see featured? I’d like to do something recent that’s actually “literary”, but it’ll be hard to find something that enough people have read. Here are some options (but feel free to come up with your own)...

• Lincoln in the Bardo?
• The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao?
• The Goldfinch?
• Middlesex?
• Americanah?

Or should I go back to the high school canon? It’d be hard to say anything about them that you didn’t already hear from your high school teacher, but I could test myself:

• The Great Gatsby?
• Jane Eyre?
• Beloved?
• Midnight’s Children?

What other canonical books do you suggest?  (I’m loathe to do anything in translation because then I can’t talk knowledgeably about the language.)  Or should I go really crazy and do some non-fiction?

Let me know in the comments, folks (if you want me back!)

Holes: The Archive

An early piece I wrote about how they made a small change for the movie that robbed it of a lot of its power, but they had little choice, because all behavior looks worse onscreen:

• Books Vs. Movies, Addendum: All Behavior Looks Worse Onscreen, Part 2

And here's my recent Annotation project series:

• The Annotation Project: Holes
• Rulebook Casefile: Why Do We Like Stanley in “Holes”?
• Storyteller’s Rulebook: How to Write a Great Villain Introduction
• Rulebook Casefile: The Power of Mixing Information Superior, Information Inferior, and Equal Information Positions
• Storyteller’s Rulebook: Writing for Reluctant Readers
• Storyteller’s Rulebook: Establish the Worst Things That Could Happen

Game of Thrones: The Archive

Here’s the recent series I did about the first book:

• The Annotation Project: A Game of Thrones
• Before We Begin: A Full Accounting of My History with “Game of Thrones”
• The Book that Breaks Every Rule, Part 1: Have One Hero
• The Book that Breaks Every Rule, Part 2: End the First Book in a Series in a Satisfactory Way
• The Book that Breaks Every Rule, Part #3: Write What You Know
• The Book that Breaks Every Rule, Part 4: Love Your Characters
• The Book that Breaks Every Rule, Part 5: Commit to your Genre
• The Book that Breaks Every Rule, Part 6: Only Name Important Characters
• Straying from the Party Line: The Power and Peril of POV in “A Game of Thrones”
• Storyteller’s Rulebook: Prologues Can Be a Microcosm of the Story
• Game of Thrones, Conclusion: So Why Do I Like It So Much?

And two earlier things I wrote about the books and TV show:

• Books vs. Movies, Addendum: Sometimes Movies (Or, in This Case, TV) Can Go Places Books Can’t
• How to Manage Expectations, Step 4: Set the Mood

Game of Thrones, Conclusion: So Why Do I Like It So Much?

I could go on for another week about “A Game of Thrones”, but I’m wearing out, so let’s flip all the cards back* and get to the big question: I’ve laid out several reasons why the book shouldn’t work, and talked about how Martin turned many of his potential weaknesses into strengths, but we still haven’t really established: Why is the writing so addictive? Why did I get so sucked into reading, even though:

• I’d already decided I couldn’t countenance Martin’s worldview and abandoned the show.
• I knew everything that was going to happen so I didn’t need to read to satisfy any plot curiosity.
• I’m wary of fantasy books, and long books in general.

This gets to the heart of my book. This is the “stranger on an airplane” test: How do you learn to write so well that you win over even someone who doesn’t want your story? I think what really grabbed me was the “warm slipper” quality of the writing. What created that feeling?

• Supremely confident world-building: World-building is where most sci-fi and fantasy loses me. I end up saying “That’s not the way the world works”, even if it’s not our world. The rules of the world being presented just haven’t been properly thought-through. Martin, by combining his encyclopedic knowledge of the medieval world with his boundless imagination, has created a free-ranging world in which all of the (thousands of) pieces fit snugly, and it’s astonishing to watch it all come together. It’s all-enveloping, like a warm slipper (even though it’s a cold world, in every sense.)
• Intimate limited POV: I’ve already talked about this. The multi-sensory writing and strictly-limited POV create a sense of intense intimacy with whatever character we’re reading about. It’s the opposite of alienation. The full-identification also creates a warm slipper feeling.
• Martin is not afraid to use the oldest tricks in the books to intensify our emotional experience, which makes the book an intense thrill. A simple line like “For a heartbeat he dared to hope” right before a gruesome death works every time.

My two favorite reading experiences are also super-long, multi-POV, and set during wartime: “War and Peace” by Tolstoy and “The USA Trilogy” by Dos Passos (which I originally encountered in one volume). Martin isn’t in that league, but he’s doing the same thing they’re doing: Creating a vast world at a tragic time, though many intensely intimate points of view. In all three cases, I found it addictive and didn’t want it to end.

(One difference is that Tolstoy and Dos Passos didn’t abuse my addiction.  They finally wrapped up their epic sagas just before I could exhaust myself. Martin just keeps his junkies on the hook year after year. The other difference is that I ultimately agree with Tolstoy and Dos Passos’s worldview, but disagree with Martin’s, which is why I was able to painfully break away a few hundred pages into the second book.)

*Never let it be said that my pop-cultural references are not super-up-to-date.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Prologues Can Be a Microcosm of the Story

We’ve talked about the pros and cons of having a prologue. “A Game of Thrones” has a particular kind familiar from genre fiction: the “kill everybody off” prologue. (As it happens here, one of the characters runs away, only to have his head lopped off immediately in the next chapter as a result.) We get things off to an exciting start and establish the seriousness of the dangers our heroes will face in the rest of the book.

Martin identifies it as a prologue in order to hint to us that the real book hasn’t started so maybe we shouldn’t be looking around for a hero yet. We aren’t that surprised when things end badly. So Martin gets to tell a little contained short story with its own beginning, middle and end. He gets us to care about the characters a little bit, but not too much, just enough to find it horrific when they’re dispatched.

But Martin is also doing something else interesting: He’s telling the whole story of the novel, indeed of the whole first trilogy (Martin was still planning on just doing three books at this point.) Martin’s story has a definitive moral: Young men should not lead old men. In this book, we get two horrific young rulers in the form of Joffrey and Robert Arryn, and we get hints that Robb Stark might be rashly declaring himself King in the North. (Robb’s rise will indeed turn out to be disastrous in the next two books.)

But you don’t need to read the whole book because it’s all right there in the prologue. Three rangers have been sent north of the wall, the youngest of whom is the son of a lord, so he’s been put in charge of the other two. This young “lordling” has a beautiful but unnotched sword that has “never been swung in anger” (not a good thing!) He cares more for his honor and glory than he does for the lives of his men. We get a line that could be used in many storylines throughout the book:

• “If I need instruction, I will ask for it,” the young lord said.

So our prologue is a cautionary tale in more ways than one. It’s warning about the danger of the white walkers, but also about the dangers of the lordling class. We may only notice the first danger, but the second has been subconsciously planted. It’s never too early to introduce your theme.

Straying from the Party Line: The Power and Peril of POV in “A Game of Thrones”

Last week I focused on the ways that George R. R. Martin intentionally (and boldly) broke the rules with “A Game of Thrones”, and mostly got away with it. This week, I promise, I will finally get to more of what the book does unambiguously right, but I thought I would feature one last broken rule, this one seemingly unintentional. But here it’s the exception that proves the rule, because it shows how well Martin does it the rest of the time.

I think one of the great strengths of these books is the use of strict third-person limited-POV with strong sensory writing. This is Writing 101: Build identification (whether in 1st or 3rd) by keeping us in one head and use all five senses to make that head come to life. And it’s especially important in a book like this that has a different POV each chapter. As with Tolstoy, the POV keeps shifting but while we’re in one head, we’re intensely and intimately in that one head.

Martin not only tells us what his limited-POV characters see, hear, feel on their skin, touch, taste, smell, and think, he also tells us how each sense affects the others. He tells us how thoughts affect senses: “It made Bran’s skin prickle to think of it.” And how senses affect thoughts: “The taste of cold iron in his mouth gave him comfort.” This is intimate. Here’s a classic Martin sentence: “His muscles cramping and his fingers numb with cold, he climbed down.” Two feelings, then an action. That’s a good ratio.

But let’s talk about the Martin’s odd prologues, and why he does them that way, and something he does on his first page that I can only describe as a mistake.

For 71 of his 72 chapters, Martin has a named POV at the beginning of the chapter, but he sets up a convention that he uses in each book: Only the prologue has no named POV. This is an odd choice. It would seem to me that the beginning is when you want a POV the most, to quickly bond us to a character when we’re seeking around for one. (Although Rowling does something similar, doesn’t she? The key difference there is that she adopts a truly omniscient voice for that first chapter, including a little authorial commentary, which Martin remains limited even in his prologues, with no authorial voice.)

So why does he do it? Possibly just because he’s going to kill these characters off, so he doesn’t name them so as to let us know not to care about them. All of his other POV characters return at least five times.

But here’s Martin’s bizarre mistake: You should never have a chapter that’s almost entirely from one character’s POV, but drifts into another character’s POV just once, even though you don’t need to. 

The first time we see into a character’s head, in the fourth line of the book, it’s the older man Gared: “Gared did not rise to the bait. He was an old man, past fifty, and he had seen the lordlings come and go.”  But then in the seventh line we enter Will’s head: “Will had known they would drag him into the quarrel sooner or later. He wished it had been later rather than sooner.” And then we’re limited to Will’s POV for the whole rest of the prologue. The subsequent non-dialogue paragraphs begin “Will could see…” and “Will shared his…” etc.

Martin was already a veteran novelist when this came out, but this is something I see beginners do all the time: Limit themselves almost entirely to one POV, only to slip into another character’s head just for a second. It ruins all the good work of your POV-limiting.

And indeed I was alienated by the opening pages of this book. The book didn’t grab me right away. It was only when we had settled into Will’s POV, and I started feeling his five senses, that I was finally able to figure out who each of these three characters were and how I should feel about them.

Martin in no way needs that slip into Gared’s head. Gared’s opinion on Royce could have been evident from what he says, what he does, or just a look Will sees in his eyes.  In fact, throughout the book Martin does a great job letting us know what other characters are thinking just using his POV character’s senses. Here’s an example with Will, looking at Ser Waymar: “Ser Waymar was panting from the effort now, his breath steaming in the moonlight.” Will sees and hears what Ser Waymar is feeling, simply by observing the outward manifestation of those emotions.

It doesn’t matter if the prologue has a named POV or not: If it’s 99% from one character’s POV, then it’s a bad idea to stray into another character’s head for just one line. An editor should have cut it.

The Book that Breaks All the Rules, Part 6: Only Name Important Characters

When we start “A Game of Thrones”, we’re quickly overwhelmed with names. Why does Ned have to take twenty riders with him out to chop off this man’s head? Couldn’t he have taken six? And a lot of them get names and some dialogue, even though we’ll never hear from again:

• “Direwolves loose in the realm, after so many years,” muttered Hullen, the master of horse. “I like it not.”
• And later: “You cannot do that, boy,” said Harwin, who was Hullen’s son.

Couldn’t he have just given that second line to Hullen? Why does the horse master’s son, who we’ll never see again, have to be in this chapter?

Well, don’t worry, if you get confused as to who everybody is, you can simply turn to the appendix at the back, right? If you do, you’ll find yourself buried in hundreds of names. At times, the sprawling story resembles Gabriel Marcia Marquez, but at least Marquez kept his cheat-sheet down to one page. Like Marquez, Martin is already repeating names in the first chapter (Robert and Robb)

This breaks the rules. As I say here, you want to keep the character list down as low as possible: by limiting the number of characters, limiting the number of speakers, and using a naming convention that makes it clear who’s important (he could have just said, “said Ned’s master of horse” without giving a name.)

Does it get away with it? Yes and no. I’m notorious bad at keeping up with these sorts of things, and I suspect that the only reason I was able to follow the book was because I’d seen the TV show first. I’ll never know if this would have been a dealbreaker with me or not.

But I can see that Martin does everything in his power (short of, you know, telling a simpler story) to help us keep track of everybody. He does this through an old trick that goes all the way back to grey-eyed Athena: He uses consistent descriptive language over and over. Let’s look at Theon: He’s introduced with “Theon was a lean, dark youth of nineteen who found everything amusing.” That’s a great character description we haven’t heard a million times before. Then after that we get:

• He laughed, put his boot on the head, and kicked it away
• Greyjoy was laughing and joking as he rode
• …Theon Greyjoy said with wry amusement

Each character is strongly characterized. The important characters are well-distinguished from each other and come alive.

Once he’s done the gargantuan task of getting us to understand who everybody is, the number of characters becomes a strength, not a weakness. This world feels real and lived in. It sprawls, but that means that we enjoy sprawling out in it.