Category Archives: reading

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin

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This week is A More Diverse Universe Blog Tour, which I’m not actually formally participating in (as in, by signing up to their list) but which I want to honor by recommending some books.

 

I start today with Middle Grade novel WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE MOON, by Grace Lin.

I picked this novel up because it is on the reading list for the Sirens Conference (a conference on women in fantasy literature) which I am attending in October. I don’t read a lot of Middle Grade as it doesn’t usually hit my sweet spot. The MG novels I enjoy most tend to rely heavily on an interesting world (e.g. Stephanie Burgis’s A TANGLE OF MAGICKS). Lin’s novel meets the challenge easily. It’s a marvelous story.

Minli lives in poverty with her parents, and goes on a quest to find the Old Man on the Moon to try and solve her family’s problems. The setting is based on Chinese folklore without the setting ever being identified as a “fantasy China.” It doesn’t need to be because it is the place Minli lives.

First of all, WTMMTM has spare, effective, and lovely writing. It is written in the manner of a folk tale expanded with more tales being told inside it by other people and creatures. All the tales eventually curl around to become part of the main tale and the solution, and from a deceptively simple start Lin uses the tales to build and enhance the whole. It is a pleasure to read, and it has that folkloric thing where there is a moral or lesson and yet without it being at all heavy-handed or stilted; what Minli (and we) learn flows naturally from the course of the tale, and it speaks to all hearts.

Guest Post: The Stress of their Regard: Book Reviews and the Reactions to them, by Paul Weimer

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A conversation on Twitter a few weeks ago about the challenges of reviewing books in the new social media got me to thinking about what it must be like to be a book-blogger and/or online reviewer who ends up interacting not just with other readers but with writers and other people in the publishing industry in a way that could not really have happened quite so extensively before.

So I asked reviewer Paul Weimer to write a guest post about his experiences and thoughts. Here it is!  (KE)

 

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The Stress of their Regard: Book Reviews and the Reactions to them.

by Paul Weimer

 

Like Thomas Jefferson, I cannot live without books. Reading books, be it fiction or nonfiction, an epic fantasy or the life of Cicero, makes up a substantial amount of my recreational time. And like anyone, I form opinions about the book, as I am reading (electronic books are wonderful for this), and after I have read the book.

I am a writer, and so my opinions, observations and perspectives about a book inevitably find themselves committed to words. As an active member of the genre community, these thoughts on books and authors inevitably find publication in a number of online venues.

However, publishing book reviews, especially in a hothouse environment that the world of genre fiction can be, comes with a set of challenges and stresses that threaten to corrode my will and desire to share my opinions. It is those challenges and stresses that I would like to elucidate for you.

It is a tightrope act, for me as a reviewer, to write a book review, whether a book exceeded my expectations, or fell vastly short of them. On the one hand, my personal ethics as a reviewer, and the role I play, mandate honesty in my reviews for books. The currency of respect I earn is only valid if my reviews are an honest assessment of the book I have read, presented in a clear and concise manner. If I am dishonest in my reviews, it will quickly come across the page, and my reviews will be at best unread, and worst, denigrated and shunned.

On the other hand, my place in the genre community means that I am often extremely chatty, virtually and otherwise, with the writers I am reading. Some of them I consider friends. When a book of theirs doesn’t meet all of my expectations, or even worse, falls flat for me, there is a real problem for me as a reviewer and as a person. I don’t have illusions that I move the meter on sales for a writer, much. However, slagging their novel baby or being perceived as having done so, makes me a bad social actor, and a bad friend.

I recently quailed over writing a review of a book that simply fell far short of expectations for me. I like the author. The author likes me. With reservations, I liked the author’s debut effort, but this second effort did not meet my expectations and hopes. Writing a review that is honest and fair, and yet does not cause unintended mental anguish in the friend has been extremely difficult.

On the other hand, when I am confronted with a book I absolutely adore and want to tell the world about, the reverse problem applies. Did I really like the book that much, or am I being too much of a promoter for the author and her work? Am I allowing the friendship and respect I have for the writer and her work to cloud my judgement of flaws and problems with a book? How much of a glowing review is me wishing the author well? How do I convey to the reader genuine enthusiasm and elucidate the real quality of the author’s work? How do I avoid looking like I am fawning over a writer’s work? How do I avoid unknowingly fawning over a book?

These tensions form a conundrum that I continually am confronted with. Keep reviews fair and honest, and remain a responsible social actor with the friends and acquaintances I have made, in readers, fellow reviewers, and authors.  Every book I read, every review I write is a re-assessment of this fundamental problem. Every review is a new change to grapple with these issues. It causes me stress every time I start on a review. It even starts as I am reading a book, wondering what I am going to write about it, how I am going to handle these issues this time out.

So why do I persist? Why do I put myself through this wringer? Why don’t I simply trunk my reviews?  There are two main reasons.

First, any writer, and I am no exception, wants their work to be seen by others. A trunked review is little better than just composing it in my own mind, save for the chance to work on my craft. A writer wants their work to be seen, to be read, to have life beyond their computer screen. I am no exception to this rule. Until my reviews started being published in higher visibility online locales, they languished for lack of attention and feedback. Now, I have people who look forward to my next review, and the reviews have given me offers and opportunities to write other things, in a variety of venues.

Second, I feel like I am providing a useful service. If I can walk that tightrope, and provide fair, balanced, ethical and honest reviews of books, I am providing useful information and feedback out there about books, for readers and authors alike. There are a swath of book review sites which are nothing but glowing reviews of the books they receive, read and review. the reviews at aggregate sites like Amazon are often worse than useless in trying to determine if a book is worth reading, given the propensity for people to use reviews as a way to grind their ax, be it complaints about the cost, jihads against an author, or even stranger obsessions. I like to think my review is far more valuable than that white noise.

So what have I learned? I’ve been reviewing for years, but only in the last year and a half have my reviews had any large amount of visibility due to the venues they have been published in. I have noticed an evolution in my style, improvement in my writing, and an increased readership. I firmly believe that readers and writers reading my work, commenting and talking about my reviews, and in general the greater visibility of my work makes me a better reviewer. I’ve learned from reading my fellow reviewers, as well, studying what they do, what they eschew, and how people react to their work. I have flourished under the pressure.

And so I persist in staying in the stress of their regard as I read and review books.

 

 

Not really a Prince of Amber, but rather an ex-pat New Yorker that has
found himself living in Minnesota for the last 10 years, Paul
“PrinceJvstin” Weimer has been reading SF and Fantasy long before
there was a World Wide Web. He and his book reviews, columns and other
contributions to genre can be found at his own blog, Blog Jvstin
Style,[http://www.skyseastone.net/jvstin ] SF
Signal[http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/author/paulweimer/ ]  the
Functional Nerds[
http://functionalnerds.com/category/book-review/paul-weimer/] ,
Twitter[http://twitter.com/#!/PrinceJvstin ] , Livejournal[
http://princejvstin.livejournal.com/]  and many other places on the
Internet.

The Omniscient Breasts

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After years of thinking about this issue, and inspired by a comment on Twitter about omniscient breasts, I have finally written a post on the male gaze, the female gaze, and sexualized women in fantasy and science fiction novels.

Imagine a female pov character is going along about her protagonist adventure, seeing things from her perspective of the world as written in third person. She hears, sees, considers, and makes decisions and reacts based on her view of the world and what she is aware of and encounters. Abruptly, a description is dropped into the text of her secondary sexual characteristics usually in the form of soft-focus Playboy-Magazine-style sexualized kitten-bunny-I-would-fuck-her-in-a-heartbeat lustrous-eyes-and-nipples phrases. Her breasts have just become omniscient breasts.

 

You can read the whole thing over at Hugo-award-winning weblog & fanzine SFSignal.

Maps (and miscellaneous)

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1) Thank you to all who offered recommendations for light, humorous reading material. It is much appreciated. I’m going to get a selection of things and then see what sticks. Should be fun.

2) The winner of the copy of THE SHADOWED SUN by N.K. Jemisin was Kate P from the UK. Congrats!

3) There is a map of Europa in Cold Magic, and a map of North Amerike and the Antilles in Cold Fire. There may be a slightly more detailed map of Europa (or at least a part of it) in Cold Steel. Here’s your chance to request other map subjects, if indeed you have any. Is anyone interested in a map of the cities of Adurnam or Expedition?

I know that some love maps, some are indifferent, and some dislike them. That’s as it should be.

I personally like maps, because I’m geeky that way but also because I process information both visually and kinesthetically, and thus maps make it easier for me to negotiate certain kinds of plots. Yet with other stories, I don’t even think of wanting a map. I wonder if there is a kind of story that seems more to benefit by a map while others just don’t have any call for them.

There are narratives in which there are things about the world you can’t learn from the story but which you can glimpse if the book includes a map, so in that sense a map can add a bit of extra dimension to a world. One of the challenges of writing the Spiritwalker books in first person is that there is a lot of information about the world that can never get into the narrative because it isn’t something a) the narrator would reflect on much less know &/or b) that is necessary to the plot.

In world building as it happens on the page, I believe there is another way at looking at “mapping.” By this I don’t necessarily mean an actual drawn graphic map as a representation of a place, but a map of geography and society and history that is created in the mind of the reader as s/he walks through the story.

Secondary world stories (a term commonly used to describe stories that are set in worlds that are not this world) have to walk a fine balance. If you pile in too much detail, then it slows down the pace and drive of the story (I’m not immune to this writing flaw). However, if you put in too little detail, then the danger becomes that readers will mentally fall back to a “standard.” That is, they may read onto the world a kind of generic medieval-Europe (or British Victorian or whatever) setting regardless if that is the one there. If a story is set in a Europe-inspired setting, then this is not a problem. But if the story is not meant to be set in that landscape, the writer (I think) has to invest a little more detail and explanation to differentiate their world from the sort of world people so often expect to see in, say, fantasy novels. Of course, again, too much detail and the narrative bogs down. The endless cycle thereby continues: What to show? What to leave out?

How do you write or read through this balance?

 

I need book recommendations

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Please recommend to me light, humorous mainstream novels appropriate for a broad-minded 85 year old man recovering (splendidly, but still . . . ) from surgery. Probably not Prachett or other sff-related genre humor as he is not an sff genre reader (although he has read all of my novels). But the humor can range afield from, say, the Kingsley Amis type “comic” novels or Wodehouse. IOW, something more recent and maybe not just from a white male academic perspective, if you see what I mean.

 

He just read a grim Icelandic WWII/Cold War thriller, and wants a break and something more hopeful and uplifting. Not cloying, though. Satirical is all right, but surely there recent mainstream comic novels out there that would please.

 

Thanks in advance.

Looking for women in historically-based fantasy worlds

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This post is slightly adapted from a conversation I held with Ken Scholes on (now defunct) Babel Clash in September 2009. I was inspired to dig up the old post from a reference to it made in another September 2009 post by Aliette de Bodard on Female protagonists in historical fantasy, which she had reason to refer to today on Twitter. de Bodard’s post is just as fresh and important today as it was then, as alas this subject comes up with discouraging regularity.

I wanted to talk about how writers can try to find a way out of the assumptions they may be bringing to the table when deciding whether and how much to introduce female characters into fantasy novels whose settings are based on a version of the past. That is, they may be historical fantasy or secondary world fantasy derived from research into our own historical past.

Even in patriarchal societies of the past (and present!), women who might otherwise have been banned by custom or law from partaking in the public life of politics, power, learning, work and so on still had personalities. I can’t emphasize this enough. People–even women!–have personalities regardless of how much or how little political power they have. People can live a quiet life of daily work out of the public eye, and still have personalities. Really! They can still matter to those around them, they can matter to themselves, and they can influence events in orthogonal ways that any self respecting writer can easily dream up.

Furthermore, with a little careful study of history, one discovers that women found ways to accomplish plenty of “things” big and small, personal and political. Maybe they did it behind a screen, or around the corner, or in the back room or in a parlor, or ran the brewery they inherited from a deceased husband, but they did all kinds of stuff that was either never noticed or was elided from historical accounts.  So much of our view of what women “did” in the past is mediated through accounts written by men who either didn’t see women or were so convinced (yes, I’m looking at you, Aristotle, but you are but one among many) that women were an inferior creature that what they wrote was not only biased but selectively blind. Even now, in “modern” day, so much is mediated by our assumptions about what “doing” means and by our prejudices and misconceptions about the past.

In reality, while women in many cultures worldwide had (and have) fewer legal rights as well as often living in constrained or deplorably oppressive circumstances, they still had (and have) minds and hands and hearts. Weird about that. Women have found ways to use their minds and hands and hearts, because people do. They may even have been happy and productive and respected.

In the last few decades, historical scholarship has been expanding the scope of who and what merits examination. Historians have excavated the lives of women so long overlooked and ignored.

Writers writing stories that deal with power politics in the age of palaces would do well, for instance, to check out a book like Servants of the Dynasty:  Palace Women in World History, edited by Anne Walthall.  This cross cultural study of palace women in a number of pre-modern societies worldwide does not sugarcoat or distort the realities of women’s lives, but it also illuminates the many misconceptions people may have about women in such societies and in such specific circumstances, awake within the halls of power.

The scholarship on women in medieval Europe is extensive. I own too many titles to list them here, but one might start with a book like Singlewomen in the European Past: 1250-1800, edited by Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide.

I have fewer non-European studies that specifically deal with women’s history, although I’m expanding my library as I find new (to me) material, books like Women Writing Africa: West Africa and the Sahel, edited by Esi Sutherland-Addy and Aminata Diaw, and Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas by Barbara A. Mann.

This kind of reading will open up possibilities for writers who may be having trouble figuring out where women “fit” into epic/high fantasy, but they’re so very valuable for anyone, really. There are other places to look as well, sources well outside the hierarchical boundaries of academic scholarship.

The key, I suspect, is wanting to open the door.

The narrative of women in fear and pain

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My spouse and I started watching Fringe to see if we would like it. The first episode was cool except for the cliched and unnecessary “put the female lead in her underwear” scene. Undressed scenes are what killed my interest in watching the US remake of Nikita with Maggie Q because I could not get past the gratuitous bikini and lingerie scenes in the pilot, which were evidently needed to undercut the fact that she is meant to be a dangerous and out of control assassin and perhaps to attract a male viewership evidently deemed (by the producers and writers) too sexist to be willing to watch a show with a woman lead unless she is undressed for them. I don’t know, maybe some other reason. What I do know is that the plot did not need the undressing for the scenes to work.

But then in the second episode of Fringe they went right for a “serial killer of young attractive women” plot for no reason other than there is evidently something in Hollywood or maybe our culture that gets off on these scenes of young women in poses of sexual passivity being terrified and mutilated and screaming screaming screaming. I had to walk out of the room because not only am I sick of it but it creeps me out.

I’m not creeped out by the knowledge that terrible things happen to young women (and old women, and children and men and all manner of people especially those who are vulnerable and unprotected). I’m outraged and saddened by that knowledge, and I honestly think there is an important and even vital place in our literature (books, film, etc) for strong, fearless depictions of suffering and injustice, so we don’t lose sight of what we must strive to change. The people who suffer must not be silenced because of the discomfort of others who don’t want to be forced to acknowledge, to see, that suffering and injustice exists.

But I *am* creeped out that images and portrayals of young women in positions of sexualized passivity who are in fear and in pain are used over and over again AS ENTERTAINMENT, to give us a thrill, to make our hearts pound.

I remember the time a couple of years ago I went with my daughter, then 20, to a video store (remember those?) to get a movie to watch for the night.

After about five minutes she said, “Mom, I can’t stand to look at all these DVD covers because so many of them show women in poses of fear or pain and it really disturbs me like it is telling me that this is the story I have to internalize about becoming a woman.”
And I realized I had gotten so used to it–had gotten myself used to it–that when I browsed through a video store looking at film posters & DVD covers filled with shocking images of objectified and sexualized women in fear and pain, I just skipped my gaze right over it like it was ordinary and nothing to remark on. I had learned to stop seeing it as much as possible. It had become ordinary and nothing to remark on.

That brought me up short. I had hardened myself to it, and I had just assumed that my daughter would grow up learning to harden herself to it. But she couldn’t, or maybe she didn’t want to. Maybe she thought she shouldn’t have to.

It made me think about how when I write I have to struggle against the idea, sunk down deep inside me, that when I write about women they have to be afraid or they have to be in pain.

Too often when the stories of women in fear and pain are told, we are seeing them in pain, we are being pushed into the perspective not of the woman who is suffering pain but into the perspective of the person inflicting the pain.

We’re constantly being asked to identify with inflicting pain on others.

Of course we are. You don’t just take over the other person’s life and body; you also take their voice, their dreams, their perspective. You take their right to speak and leave them with only the power to suffer, a suffering that can be lifted from them by death or by rescue but always by an agency outside themselves. You take their eyes and turn them into your eyes, your gaze, your way of looking at the world. When such stories are told in this way, they reinforce the perspective of the person who is watching the voiceless have no voice.

But while it is important to say “let’s stop telling those stories then because they exploit women and furthermore perpetuate the view of women as victims whose only role is to suffer fear and pain,” I would go on to suggest that it is not quite that simple. It isn’t binary; it’s not either/or. And furthermore, all stories of women’s fear and pain are not the same because it does make a difference from what perspective we see.

In her memoir Mighty Be Our Powers (written with Carol Mithers), Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Ghobee of Liberia talks about discovering the need to find spaces in which women could tell their stories. Some of the stories she heard were stories that came out of the civil wars  that wracked Liberia, the Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone; others were stories that had to do with untold experiences within families, the kind of thing no one wants to talk about no matter where it happens. She writes:

Each speaker wept with relief when she finished; each spoke the same words: “This is the first time I have ever told this story . . . ”

Does it sound like a small thing that the women I met were able to talk openly? It was not small; it was groundbreaking. . . . Everyone was alone with her pain.

Everyone was alone with her pain.

That line stabs me in the heart. I do not want me, or you, or anyone to be alone with the pain.

Yes, I get angry and creeped out when I see and read stories about women in fear and pain, seen from the outside, looking down on them, inflicting pain on them through the gaze of the story.

I get especially angry when I’m told that these are the only or the most realistic stories, that they trump any other way of looking at the lives of women. Because they don’t.  This perspective looks in only one direction; that makes it an incomplete, biased, subjective, and even warped perspective.

You see, I worry that it is another form of silencing when women’s stories of fear and pain are not given voice when the voice is theirs or when an incident of violence or fear is told from the perspective of the person who undergoes that experience, who must live with it, be changed by it, internalize it, fight against the injury it has done to her, build or continue her life, live defined by herself and not by her injury.

I worry that it is another form of silencing when all such stories are seen as the same without considering from whose perspective they’re being told. It is not a small thing to speak up and to hear stories and voices that have long been silenced.

There are indeed too many stories that fixate on women’s fear and pain, and more than that, in my opinion too often it is the wrong stories that get the attention, the wrong stories that are held up as the right ones, the only ones, the most authentic ones. The truth is usually difficult and complex and often so painful that it is easier to look away. All too often, silence is the ally of the powerful.

So, yes, I will rage against the exploitative portrayals of sexualized violence, of women in fear and pain. But I will also remember the women who never told their story because there was no one to listen.

Long Update & Linkage: January 2011

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Work proceeds on Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3) which will, indeed, complete the Spiritwalker Trilogy. It’s going slowly because it is complex, but I’m pleased with my progress even though I wish it were writing more quickly. However, my chief goal is to write the best book I can, rather than the speediest book I can.

Strangely, google’s search engine is currently blocking my web page (and therefore also my wordpress site, which is on my web page) from all searches, but it is still there at (if you’re reading this on Live Journal) at www.kateelliott.com

Other search engines like Bing and Yahoo do still find the web site and wordpress blog. We are looking into it but have yet to get a satisfactory response from google.

Meanwhile, I expect to be online less than usual until I complete a draft of Cold Steel. I’m seriously considering a couple of pieces of short fiction in the Spiritwalker world as well to go with the Rory short story, one featuring Rory and one featuring Bee (the tale promised at the end of Cold Fire, in fact).

I do intend to write a series of posts on World Building but I really can’t work on them concertedly until I have a complete draft of Cold Steel in hand.

In the meantime, I don’t intend to post on my blog much until 1) said draft is complete and 2) the google search engine issue is resolved.

However, you can find me on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. (although honestly I’m not there as often as I have been either due to, you know, needing to write)

Do please feel free to ask me anything, here or on Tumblr or the other social media (although I realize not everyone is on the various social media — no reason anyone should be on any of them). Answering a direct question is generally a little easier than coming up with “dedicated” posts. Also, I’m answering email at kate.elliott at sff.net

I’ll finish with four links to reviews, just because (there are other reviews I would love to link to but I’ll limit myself). Be aware that any or all of these reviews may contain spoilers for those who don’t care for that type of thing.

Beyond Victoriana: A Multicultural Perspective on Steampunk: “Characters with white, brown, and black complexions and curly tight hair, coarse braided hair, and thin hair swept up in lime-washed spikes bring racial diversity to the story.” [I was so very pleased to be reviewed on this blog.]

A one star review of Cold Fire at Fangs for the Fantasy: “The problem is that Elliot never uses 1 or 2 words where she can insert 10.”  [I have to say this is probably the single most consistently seen criticism of my writing throughout my career. I want to note that this is a very thoughtful review by a careful reader, thus proving the adage that just about any review that engages thoughtfully with the material is a “good review” regardless of whether the reviewer ultimately liked or disliked the book.]

Fantasy Book Cafe gives Cold Fire a super positive review so click through at your own risk if you don’t want to feel the love. “Also, Cat can be quite funny (especially when drunk).” [A scene I very much enjoyed writing.]

Finally, this review of Cold Magic/Fire on tumblr has what may be the best “single sentence description of the Spiritwalker books that we can’t quote on the book” ever. It reads best in context.

There’s a part of me that feels it is wrong for me to link to positive mentions of my work like the ones above, as if I am thereby somehow self aggrandizing or bragging or trying to act like I’m better than others or something. This is some of the baggage I carry from growing up as a girl in the 60s and 70s. I’m not quite sure from whence it stems, and I can certainly only speak to my own experience. Partly, it seemed to me that girls were meant to do well but never excel more than boys and certainly if they did excel weren’t ever to say anything of it because it was unseemly and boastful and something one ought to be ashamed of. In fact, there is a little piece of my psyche that feels ashamed (yes: ashamed!) when I read a review like the really fabulous one from Fantasy Book Cafe. This little bit of my psyche rubs alongside the part that is gratified and thrilled by reading a review that gets the things I have been hoping readers will get, as well as the part of the psyche that secretly feels I did a good job and deserve to see some good reviews, as well as the part that is always saying “but I need to do better next time because I can see all the things I did wrong!” We contain multitudes, as the poet said. So me and my multitudes are headed back to work.

My thanks to all of you readers. I mean that quite seriously.

I leave you with this excerpt from Cold Steel:

     When one of Kofi’s brothers appeared escorting Rory and Aunty’s granddaughter Lucretia, I sighed with relief that Rory had made it here safely. Then I saw that he was holding Luce’s hand in a most inappropriately intimate manner, their fingers intertwined like those of a courting couple. I rose, feeling a towering rage coming on that diverted me from my other looming problems.
Rory released Luce’s hand. He sauntered right past me to greet the older women, his smile as bright as the lanterns. With his lithe young man’s body well clad in one of Vai’s fashionable dash jackets and his long black hair pulled back in a braid, he surely delighted the eye. The men watched in astonishment but I knew what was coming. He offered chastely generous kisses to the women’s cheeks and tender pats to their work-worn hands.
“My apologies. I mean no offense by charging in to your territory without an invitation. But I must obey my sister. You understand how it is with a sister who speaks a bit sharply to one even though she is the younger and ought, I should suppose, look up to her older brother. Please, let me thank you. Your hospitality honors and humbles me. The food smells so good. I’m sure I’ve never smelled better. ” He had routed two already and turned to the remaining skeptic. “That fabric is beautifully dyed, and looks very well with your complexion, Aunty.”
A cavalry charge at close quarters could not have demolished their resistance more devastatingly. He turned his charm on the old men, drawing them out with irresistable questions about their proud and memorable youth.

Re-reading and the Experience of Narrative

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As far as we know, humans have always created narratives.  Before the invention of writing these stories would have been oral, spoken and/or sung, or ritualized as dance or as performances that one might equate to early theater.

In pre and proto literate cultures as well as ones in which only a small percentage of the population can read, stories are often also be reinforced through images meant to remind the person seeing the image of a story they already know.  I have seen visualized representation of narratives in diverse places.  In Thailand there are numerous depictions of the Ramakien (derived from the Hindu Ramayana), and the Khmer and later Cambodian kingdoms also used a syncretic mix of Hindu mythology and local aesthetics and culture to create images and visual narratives in their magnificent temples.  In Japan and China, one may find many “snapshots” of the life of Buddha.  In Western Europe, the stained glass on cathedral windows often depicts Bible stories or episodes from the lives of saints.

There’s a spectacular example of this Biblical illustration in an octagonal chamber that is part of the greater complex of Salisbury Cathedral.  A mural depicting scenes from the Torah (aka Old Testament) works its way around the chamber. When we visited there in 2005, my children and I walked the circuit identifying each scene.  We knew them because in Jewish practice the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) is read in its entirety every year (or across three years), a portion each week.

The experience of going regularly to synagogue and hearing the Torah, a specific portion each week, repeating every year the same, brought me to reflect upon the concept and experience of re-reading.

In our modern culture, we are most accustomed, I think, to the “what comes next” interaction with story.  This might be said to be the most childlike way of absorbing story, and I don’t mean that at all in an insulting manner.  Watching a child’s immersion in story is a remarkable process.  It’s pure.  They are either in the story, or out of it, and if they are in it, then they are embraced by it.  This is true whether they are hearing a story for the first time or the hundredth time, and in my experience children love both the new and the familiar.

As novel readers, and especially in genre novels in which plot may weigh heavily, readers often say they want and enjoy the experience of wanting to know what happens next.  Will the police officer catch the criminal?  Will she escape the rising floodwaters?

The reading experience, the story experience, in such circumstances is tied up with a sense of urgency.

Contrast that with the visualized representations mentioned above.  For those images to make any connection with the viewer beyond an abstract aesthetic appreciation for the artist’s work, the viewer has to already know the story.  If we already know the story, what are we getting out of the interaction with the narrative?

Let me take as my example the story of Joseph in the Torah.  Here are the bare bones of the plot:  Joseph is the favorite son of patriarch Jacob and is not above letting his brothers know it.  Envious, the brothers plot to kill him but end up selling him to slave traders who take him to Egypt.  He serves his master faithfully and loyally but gets in trouble because the master’s wife desires him.  Falsely accused, he lands in prison, from which he eventually extricates himself through good behavior but mostly through accurate dream interpretation, which brings him to the notice of Pharaoh, who makes him his right hand man.  Later, famine strikes, and Jacob sends some of his sons into Egypt to find food.  There is a long business with Joseph concealing his identify from his brothers and accusing the youngest, Benjamin (who happens to be his only full brother;  the others are sons by other mothers), of a theft which Joseph himself has set up by placing a gold cup in the travel bags of Benjamin before the brothers leave for the north.  This is all a convoluted means of achieving reconciliation within the family, which is accomplished.

Joseph’s story in some ways plays out as a self contained piece, quite an extensive one, and very dramatic.  Except that because we read it every year, we know how it turns out.  So the urgency in reading it is not there:  Joseph’s messengers, sent after the brothers because treasure is missing from Joseph’s house, find the gold cup in Benjamin’s bags!  What will happen!

But we already know what will happen. Yet it is possible to read this story every year (and whenever else you want to) with pleasure and interest.  (Really, who gets tired of reading a story in which the protagonist is described as a well built and handsome man?  But I digress.)

So what do we get out of the process of re-reading?

Part of it is the pleasure we get in what is comfortable (and I don’t use comfort as a bad word).  In reading terms, this is called a “comfort read,” a story you go back to as to a comfortable chair.  It is not surprise you are looking for but familiarity or reaffirmation or relaxation.

Re-visiting a story over and over is also a form of culture building.  People in a community or society share familiar touchstones, they know the same stories, they can make jokes that non-acculturated people won’t get.  The stories they value and transmit, communicate what the community is about and what it values.

In addition I want to suggest that the process of re-reading can also be defined as the process of living.

In life, we come back to the same events or choices, back to similar things, and we can never see them in exactly the way we saw them the first time, or the last but one time, when we encountered a similar moment or that same issue.

After the urgency of needing to know what happens next fades, you begin to have the leisure to look at the details.  And then you begin to have the leisure and interest to ask yourself questions.  And then you start to read between the lines.  And then you start to fill in between the lines.  And then you disagree with yourself, you change your mind, or something you learned elsewhere or an experience you had changes the way you look at the whole thing.

Is Joseph’s behavior toward his brothers–deceiving them?–justified because of what they did to him at the beginning of the story?  Is he just getting a bit of petty revenge before doing the right thing?  Or is he being a wise statesman making sure they have changed and grown, as he had, so any generosity he shows them will not be wasted, or turned against him or his master?

But maybe the real answer is not if one, or all, or none of those interpretations is true.  Maybe the real answer is questions:

What do I as the reader need to see between the lines?   What am I capable of seeing within the story?

The words stay the same but we change.  And that makes the story change, for us.

If we read the story one time in the past and moved on to another story, then the story would remain static;  it would never change, because it would be the story we had read at that one moment in our lives.  But because we reread, the story lives with us.

Using the story to explore the world: Benjamin Tate on Leaves of Flame

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(KE): Today, a guest post

 

by Benjamin Tate

HIS novel, Leaves of Flame, is out this week.

 

Once upon a time I started a novel.  I was in high school, I’d just decided that I wanted to be a writer, and so I tackled a novel (after a few half-hearted attempts at short stories).  I had an idea after all, and I had a map I’d drawn in U.S. Government class, and I could see the world in my head.  So off I went.

Ten years and five drafts later, I had a book.  During those five drafts, the world and the map and the magic fleshed itself out, not to mention I managed to teach myself how to write.  I sent it out and got rejection after rejection after rejection.  Most of those were actually good rejections, saying the writing was good, but the idea behind the novel just wasn’t quite there, not for a debut novel anyway.  It was disappointing . . . no, that’s a lie . . . it was heart-rending, but I sucked it up and started work on other books, other novels, other ideas.

And now, five published novels later, I’m looking back at that initial book.  Why?  Because the current series—in fact, all of the books I’ve written—have been set in that same world.  My first trilogy, the “Throne of Amenkor,” was set at about the same time as that first book, but on a separate continent.  The current series—including Well of Sorrows and the just released Leaves of Flame—is set on the same continent but at a much earlier time period than that first novel.  However, both series are connected to that first book in significant ways.

That’s one of the most interesting parts of writing for me, actually:  how writing one novel ends up churning the creative juices and producing thoughts and ideas that, while not appropriate for that particular book, end up expanding the world in which it is set and often produce new stories, ones that deserve their own book or perhaps their own series.  This is where my ideas come from:  the act of writing itself.  And this is how I worldbuild, letting the world expand and deepen on its own, as I write, all of the intricate little parts coming together to create a much larger, and much more complicated whole.

For example, while writing that first book I introduced a magic that I called the White Fire.  It was a wall of white fire that spread out across the world, touching everyone, changing them.  I also had my characters wandering a museum, which I needed to fill with strange, cool artifacts.  One of those artifacts was a throne that, when approached, appeared warped and caused those near to hear thousands of whispering voices.  Both of these ideas—not important for that first book—combined and gave me the genesis for my “Throne of Amenkor” series.  How would this White Fire affect someone on the other side of the world, someone who had no idea where the fire originated or what it was for?  How would it change them, personally, and what kind of an affect would it have on the society?  These questions piqued my interest and the trilogy that grew out of that became an extension of that first unpublished novel.  It expanded what I knew of the world, because I hadn’t spent much time thinking about the cultures on the other side of the world yet, and it deepened my understanding of the White Fire itself and the consequences of its use.

For my current series, the extension from that first book was a little more blatant, but also harder to deal with.  The characters in that first book were dealing with the actions that their ancestors had taken in the past, those that resorted to the White Fire as a last, desperate act to save themselves.  As the book progressed, I learned more and more about those ancestors, what drove them, and the history of the world I’d created.  That history deepened with each revision, became more cohesive and more complicated, until I suddenly realized that the history itself could be a trilogy of its own!

That’s the series I’m currently writing:  that history.  And I’m finding that as I write, the history that I felt was so detailed before was actually lacking.  Not in facts, but in the character details that make a story come to life.  Those characters don’t always react and behave the way that you want them to, so one of the challenges I’ve run into is letting the characters come alive without having them change the “history” already written.  What I’ve discovered meeting this challenge head on is that history is full of layers.  There’s the rote “this is what happened” history, which is all that I really touched on in that first book.  There’s the “this is why we think that happened” history, in other words, the perception people have of history, based only on what they’ve been told or read.  And then there’s the “this is what REALLY happened” history, where the skeletal outlines of what happened is the same, but the characters who actually created that history have added their own layer of flesh and blood and sinew, making that history come alive.

As I write this new series, keeping that first book in mind and where the world ends up after the events of this story, I find that the world I created way back then has so much more depth than I ever could have imagined.  I’ve also discovered that getting all of the threads of all of the stories and books I’ve written to weave together is not only hard and challenging, it’s also a great deal of fun.  I now consider that first book “research.”  I was using that story to explore my own world, to spend time there and get to know it.  Will that first book ever see print?

Possibly.  The world is full of wonders, after all.  *grin*

 

 

Joshua Palmatier (aka Benjamin Tate) is a fantasy writer with DAW Books, with two series on the shelf, a few short stories, and is co-editor with Patricia Bray of two anthologies.  Check out the “Throne of Amenkor” trilogy—The Skewed Throne, The Cracked Throne, and The Vacant Throne—under the Joshua Palmatier name.  And look for the “Well” series—Well of Sorrows and the just released Leaves of Flame—by Benjamin Tate.  Find out more about both names at www.joshuapalmatier.com and www.benjamintate.com, as well as on Facebook, LiveJournal (jpsorrow), and Twitter (bentateauthor).