Adventure classics -- Reading, writing can get you killed

The Handmaid’s Tale

by Margaret Atwood

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I wasn’t thinking about Malala Yousafzai when I chose Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, for this month’s July of science fiction classics. To my mind, Handmaid’s rigidly defined gender roles seemed more about reproductive freedom than literacy. Who could imagine a world where unauthorized possession of writing materials carried a death sentence?

Unfortunately, Malala Yousafzai can. She, of course, is the teenager shot in the head by the Taliban for promoting education for girls in Pakistan.

In a bizarre attempt at self-justification, a Taliban leader later wrote Ms. Yousafzai, explaining that she wasn’t shot for being an advocate of education. She was shot instead for her “pen” -- for using her education to criticize them. Which didn’t stop the now sixteen-year-old from proclaiming at the United Nations, “One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world.”

It’s with more subdued bravado that the heroine of The Handmaid’s Tale cherishes the message she finds in her owner’s house, “scratched with a a pin or maybe just a fingernail, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

“It was a message, and it was in writing, forbidden by that very fact, and it hadn’t yet been discovered. Except by me, for whom it was intended. It was intended for whoever came next. It pleases me to ponder this messages. It pleases me to think I’m communing with her, this unknown woman.”

The unnamed narrator is known only as “Offred,” from the name of her owner Fred, an elite official within the near-future country of Gilead, formed from the remnants of the United States after a military coup. After murdering the president and Congress (an act
initially blamed on “Islamic terrorists”), Gileadites suspend the constitution and enforce a stringent caste system based on gender. Among these castes are the legalized concubines known as “handmaids,” assigned to produce children for childless members of the Gilead elite.

During a failed escape attempt, her husband is killed and their daughter given to a childless couple. The narrator is given the choice between accepting a handmaid’s life as a walking reproductive organ or becoming and “unwoman” exiled to painful death in “colonies” poisoned by radioactive pollution. .

She chooses life, reasoning, “all you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.” Except she only has three chances to produce a child by the elderly -- and mostly sterile -- men she’s assigned to or she’ll end up in the colonies anyway. And now she’s on that third chance.

“How did you know (in 1985) this was going to happen in the Middle East,” a listener asked Atwood at her appearance this spring in connection with the Dallas Museum of Art’s Arts and Letters program.

Atwood’s answer was that, although the novel was written shortly after the 1979 Iranian Revolutions, it’s not simply a cautionary tale about the Middle East.  The horror, she insisted, lies in “watching how quickly a country -- any country -- can change when a determined group gets into power.”

For more about Atwood and her writing -- and her insistence that The Handmaid’s Tale is not, in fact science fiction -- I like her nonfiction volume, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. It, Handmaid, and more are, for now, readily available on Amazon.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics opens an August of adventures at sea with Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World.)

Wordcraft -- Where good novels go wrong

Canadian science fiction author Karl Schroeder gave us plenty of direction on outlining novels at his recent FenCon writing workshop. But as some of us know from experience, even with an outline, things can get crazy in the midst of writing a book. So Schroeder also gave us tips for finding our way through the dark forest of the novel -- and where the trouble spots lie, from beginning to end.

“They can certainly go wrong as you’re getting started,” Schroeder said. “One (way) that happens all the time -- it’s happened to me -- is great idea, no plot. The cool idea is not the story.

Don’t I know that, from having a file of story ideas that never quite got off the ground. I’ve found that, following advice from a previous FenCon workshop leader to delineate clearly the major character roles -- protagonist, relationship character, and antagonist -- was often enough to get enough to get the story back on track. (See “Bones of a novel,” parts I and II, October 12 and October 19, 2011.)

Another problem is a too-rapid outline, that is, an outline without enough material for a full-length work.

Or its opposite -- an outline or draft becoming unwieldily large. In this case, we may have succumbed to what Schroeder called “the Tolkien thing” -- writing the entire history of our story’s world before actually starting the story. In this case, the “history” takes on a life of its own that prevents making fundamental changes, no matter how necessary.

More terrifying, if possible, than bad beginnings are the “scary middles,” the places where writers discover they’ve “thrown a whole lot of balls in the air and can no longer keep it straight.” These can happen when an author finds his outline too cursory to juggle multiple issues such as story arcs for secondary characters and the overlapping subplots.

When that happens, Schroeder warned, the writer must be prepared to shift gears from high to low, outlining scene by scene.

Even after working through the beginning and middle, the ending of a novel comes with its own set of potential problems. One of those is a novel that, although otherwise all right, reaches its resolution too quickly. Having subplots can prevent a climax that occurs too quickly by giving the writer alternate ways to explore his themes.

But again, beware of the opposite problem of having too many characters, especially if you find yourself with multiple characters who have the same basic function, for instance, having two trickster characters. Remember, even Tolkien finally saw the need to reduce the number of hobbits in his stories.

For more tips from on novel writing from Schroeder’s FenCon workshop in Dallas, see “The myriad paths to a novel,” September 24, 2012, and “The myriad paths to a novel, park II,” October 8, 2012.

And for more on Schroeder and his writing, see his blog at
www.karlschroeder.com/.

(Next Monday -- well-published authors discuss the perils of the publishing industry.)

Wordcraft -- The myriad paths to a novel

Just when I think I’ve heard every way to write a novel, I attend the writing workshops at annual science fiction/fantasy convention, FenCon, in Dallas and learn there are so many more.

That was the case at this past weekend’s workshop led by Canadian science fiction author Karl Schroeder.

And Schroeder knows how to write novels. He’s written or co-written at least ten published science fiction novels, most recently Ashes of Candesce, out this year from Tor Books. Oh, and a little classic of nonfiction, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Science Fiction (with Cory Doctorow).

Self-deprecating to the core, Schroeder also mentions the twelve novels he wrote, starting at age sixteen, before he got published. As all serious fiction writers know, our apprenticeship in the storyteller’s guild consists of writing stories that may never be published.

He asks us workshop members what the components of a story are. “Beginning, middle, end,” one brave soul answers with the classic Aristotelian definition. But what if you want to tell a story like Memento, “a Jacobean revenge story, literally, but the way it’s told is backwards?” Schroeder asks.

So start instead by saying the first element is “the hook -- what gets the reader reading. After the hook, you have the introduction of characters and setting, then the development and a climax, leading all the way to the end,” Schroeder suggests.

“The idea of what a story is should never be cast in stone,” he says. “What we’re going to do is take a look at different perspectives.”

He opens with what he terms the seven-point plot “used most effectively in the Twilight Zone series.” Academically, this consists of hook, plot turn 1 (or “call to adventure), pinch (conflict), midpoint (not necessarily halfway through), plot turn 2 and pinch 2 (which Schroeder summarizes as “rinse and repeat”), and resolution. In the Twilight Zone, the resolution would be, in Schroeder’s words, “a Greek chorus commentary.” I can hear the voice of Twilight Zone host Rod Serling as Schroeder speaks.

The seven-point plot is probably enough for a short story, Schroeder says, but to write novels, we’ll have to dig deeper. Give the protagonist two problems -- one external, one internal, with failure coming from “only addressing the external problem,” and ignoring the internal one, “a character change (the protagonist) has spent the story avoiding.”

There’s also, Schroeder says, “there’s a theory of story where the story is a passionate argument between two characters.” And a theory he intriguingly calls the five-man band (for ensemble casts). And Japanese and classical Chinese ways of telling stories. The thing he most want to tell us in this first workshop session is “not to fall in the trap” of thinking there’s only one way to structure a story.

He’ll have a lot more to say later, and a lot more tools to add to our writing kits, including the possibility of discovering a story’s structure simply by writing it. For those who'd like more about the seven point plot, I’ve found a helpful source at
http://chandlermariecraig.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/cheat-sheet-7-point-story-structure/.

(I’ll continue Schroeder’s discussion in a later post, but next Monday Wordcraft takes a detour for Banned Books Week, September 30-October 6 this year. And if you think only pornographic books get banned, you don’t have the mind of a censor who can find the objectionable in A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh.)