The Grasshopper #87: How Weird Are You?
And other tales from the forest
The Washington Post has a review of a book about the rising level of weirdness in novels, charting a path that begins with H.P. Lovecraft, a writer I was briefly enamored with as a teenager. Going back to Lovecraft years later it turns out he is unreadable, something I began to suspect as an adolescent all those years ago after reading several of his stories and novels.
But he was definitely weird in a psychotic kind of way, writing about creatures from other dimensions that don’t have to obey the rules of this universe. Cool concept but he turned out to be incapable of creating a realistic human character that wasn’t a wooden bundle of quivering dread all the time.
This was all before the explosion of fantasy writing that followed the success of the Tolkien films and Game of Thrones-type low brow fantasy. That explosion did not herald a new era of wonderful stories. Instead we get endless derivative sword and sorcery junk, which is really not weird at all.
It turns out writing truly strange stuff is a lot harder than it might appear. The genre allows a writer to take our superpower, making things up, and free it from any need for logic or even believability. Is your hero backed into a corner by a three headed monster?
Just conjure up a magical sword and chop those heads off. Then have each head regenerate into a new three headed beast until the hero is beset by hordes of them. But he has a magical stick that can draw a doorway and create an escape.
And so on. Nothing weird about that either. Personally I think that writing like that is a form of masturbation not unlike most guitar solos. A truly great solo is extremely rare and a truly great weird fantasy story even more so.
But these things sell and a look through a literary agent site like QueryTracker reveals that fantasy is a big category with agents, a category with many subcategories like adult fantasy and YA fantasy and romance fantasy.
‘Adult fantasy’ always strikes me as something that should be more about sex and money than swords and sorcery, but I guess that’s actually called porn. Which gets this ramble to the subject of escapism, which is the underlying attraction in theory of these genres.
Do you read to escape? I don’t think I do but I get the concept. I read to change my perception of the world, to see things differently. And that very seldom happens because of magical swords and secret spells.
It almost always happens because the writer tells a story that rings true but strange in some way you can’t pin down. If done really well it can be truly weird because when you set the book down the world somehow has changed, maybe for good.
One example is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, a tale that has all the fantasy cliches: wandering heroes, a quest, a land wreathed in enchantment, even a dragon, but whose weirdness is baked in at a deeper level that hits you at the end as something you really didn’t see coming.
Ishiguro is a bona fide master storyteller and Booker Prize winner, no lightweight fantasist, and all his books convey this ability to alter your perception. They can be a little hard to read as the utter strangeness gradually creeps up on you.
I’m really not sure how he does it or how he, as a human, sees the world, and that is what fascinates me. Though I’m not quite sure I actually like his books. They’re almost too disturbing while being rooted in a reality that might be right next door.
I don’t think great writers sit down and say ‘I’m going to write a fantasy novel this time around’. If they happen to produce one it seems more likely the tale took a turn that fascinated them somehow and they went with it. Those are the stories that I look for as a reader.
But as a writer I think all stories are fantasies, some in a good way and many in a godawful way. The latter, I suspect, come about when a writer sets out to write a category from a list on an agent’s website.
Writer coach. Business coach. Lifestyle coach. Coaching, the non-athletic kind, is all the rage these days and has moved beyond the side hustle days of a John Candy character living in a van down by the river (still one of the funniest comedy sketches ever).
There’s big money in coaching, like most things, for a very few people. But it’s one of those professions you can pursue by simply calling yourself one. Instant expertise.
I never thought much about being a writer's coach, in part because I could never imagine needing one, much less being one. What, exactly, would I do if asked to coach someone?
Last night I was hanging out with a friend watching a tv series about Los Alamos during the development of the atomic bomb. Yes, we are history geeks and the series, called Manhattan, is actually pretty good, a kind of scientist soap opera.
She was trying to write a wedding toast for her stepdaughter who is married as I write this. She went online and found zillions of generic toasts. Apparently there are entire books containing these things. I think you’d need a steady supply of Valium to write those things. They were awful.
So, I found myself coaching my friend through writing this very brief paragraph-long speech. She was trying to get some feeling and meaning into a few sentences while not offending any exes or new spouses. I found I enjoyed prompting her with questions and providing on the fly edits. It was kind of fun.
But it was one paragraph that would be immediately forgotten no matter how moving it was. I couldn’t imagine coaching someone through something like a book length project. Yet that is what good editors do, over and over. Not copyeditors by the way, they correct things, which is essential but very different.
I would imagine a difference between a writer coach and an editor would be that the coach acts more like a psychotherapist than a film director. I wouldn’t want to be a story editor, because I think it would ruin my ability to write my own stuff. But I might be able to get someone through things like writer’s block, finding time to write, getting past the many neuroses that writers have.
But I don’t like the sports metaphor I hear with the label ‘coach’. Mentor maybe. But here’s the real issue I’d grapple with as a writer coach. I would have to love something about the writer’s work. Not just like, love. And the problem is that most writers, like most things, are ok but not great, including me.
Editors are, among other things, filters. They sift out the things that don’t work, don’t contribute to the story or the pacing, or make no sense. It’s intimate between an editor and a book, a labor of love and money.
One of the problems with a lot of online writing is there is no filter. No one gets a pre read on The Grasshopper, for example. There’s definitely no budget for that (insert paid subscription sales pitch here. Seriously).
But I have been through the process of working with a professional editor on six books and I learned a few things about myself as a writer that serve me well now that an editor is not an option. Self-editing does improve with practice for shorter pieces. But should I publish a novel, I’d want an editor, a real one.
That would be a strong motivator for pursuing a book deal, which I’m trying to develop enthusiasm for doing. We’ll see.
I just realized Christmas is a week away and I’ve barely thought about it. I don’t have kids or grandkids so there’s not much reason for the holiday to be on my radar. The Boy Scouts selling Christmas trees across the street in the church parking lot aren’t doing much business.
It’s a tough sell when we keep having mild sunny days and setting temp records. But they smell amazing when I walk outside and the breeze is just right. Then, for a moment, I get a whiff of Christmas spirit. That’s enough for me.
Next week we face a new year, the beginning of lengthening daylight, and a growing sense of optimism. At least that’s how I usually feel. Being a political writer I’m very aware of the stakes we face this coming year and the situation in Israel and Palestine, which I want to write about but grapple with finding balance.
Bethlehem, in the West Bank, could be said to be the home of Christmas and the merchants there depend on holiday tourism to make their year. But no Christmas in Bethlehem this year, another casualty of man’s insanity.
The New Year brings New Year’s Resolutions, a ritual I enact by thinking about where I might want to be next year and the kind of life I might lead. A denser than usual topic this year.
Did you write today?
Thx, Martin
1560 words
~ I write The Grasshopper, a letter for creatives, The Witness Chronicles, a weekly digest of three of my articles on politics and climate, and The Remarkable, a recovery letter, about my addiction and reentry experience. All are weekly and free with a paid option to share your support. Please check them out.
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Believe me, it makes my day. M
I'm automatically suspicious of coaches. I am sure I could make money as a writing coach because I have plenty of legit experience in just about every kind of writing there is -- I was a newspaper editor, I've worked in advertising, I was part of an online magazine startup, I do pretty well on Medium, I've published several books -- but I would rather earn a smaller amount writing MY stuff than make more money coaching other writers.