Adventure classics -- Far from the fields we know

 

The King of Elfland’s Daughter

by Lord Dunsany

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If I hadn’t been taking my usual indecipherable notes during last month’s FenCon writing workshop, I would hardly have believed I heard editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden (who forms, with wife Teresa, the Tor Books editing team Nielsen Hayden) say the name “Lord Dunsany.” Really? I’d come across Lord Dunsany’s influential 1924 fantasy novel, The King of Elfland’s Daughter, more than thirty years ago but that was the only mention of the prolific Anglo-Irish writer I had ever seen or heard of until Nielsen Hayden dropped his name.

In a lucky moment, I’d already listed The King of Elfland’s Daughter on this month‘s fantasy classics for its obvious influences on J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard’s sword and sorcery adventures, E.R.R. Eddison’s Ouroboros series, and even C.S. Lewis’s alternate universe of Narnia stories. With Nielsen Hayden’s recommendation, I had another excuse to read Lord Dunsany again.

(By the way, his full name was Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18^th Baron of Dunsany. No wonder he wrote his dozens and dozens of plays, poems, novels and short stories in a wide variety of genres under a pen name.)

Dunsany paid the publication costs for his first book--and first experiment in writing alternate universes--1905’s The Gods of Pegana, a short story collection containing its own mythology, history and geography. It must have seemed like a strange, chancy experiment to commercial publishers at the time. But reviewers and readers such as young H.P. Lovecraft couldn’t get enough. Dunsany would become “the single greatest influence on fantasy writers during the first half of the twentieth century,” editor Lin Carter wrote in his introduction to the 1969 reprint of The King of Elfland’s Daughter.

The book recounts the story set in both a timeless, otherworldly Elfland, and, in Dunsany’s own brief preface, “the fields we know, and ordinary English woods and a common village and valley.” Except that the woods are not ordinary, and I hope, not English, haunted as they are by creatures whose habitats span both worlds, or who, like unicorns, travel habitually between the two.

One day, the twelve members of the parliament of Erl take a break from their usual duties of blacksmithing and leather tanning and garden to make a strange request of their hereditary lord.

“We want to be ruled by a magic lord,” they said. And their lord replied, “It is five hundred years since my people have spoken thus in parliament, and it shall always be as your parliament saith.” So the lord of Erl summons his son Alveric to cross over the border into Elfland and marry the King of Elfland’s daughter, Lirazel. And Alveric sets out, finds the elvish princess and returns within a single elvish day, only to learn that his father has died and the parliament members have grown old in the decade or more that has passed on Earth during that one magical day in Elfland.

That is only the beginning of Alveric’s troubles. Because how can a princess who dances in the road, talks to goats and laughs at funerals ever find contentment in “the fields we know”?

“Dunsany combines the style and settings of the classical fairy tale with an adult and sophisticated viewpoint, welding the two diverse elements into one match whole through his lyric, singing prose,” Carter wrote. “Most fairy tales end with ‘and they were married and lived happily ever after. But Dunsany knows this could not be so: for Alveric was of mortal blood and hearkened after earthly things--but Lirazel was neither mortal nor earthly. . . And to Dunsany’s lasting credit goes the honor of having written a fairy tale that dares to tell you ‘what happened afterward.’”

Dunsany’s works are readily available, often in free e-book versions, as well as an armload from the Dallas Public Library.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a November of fantasy with J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.)

Wordcraft -- Don’t let our stories grow into monsters

Last Monday, Tor editors Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden recommended some fast fixes for problems they see in story submissions. Today’s post focuses on how to keep your science fiction and fantasy stories from becoming monsters. And, what Team Nielsen Hayden really wants to see more of.

One thing they dislike is writing by trends, they told their writing workshop at the recent FenCon in Dallas. Including, but not limited to what they termed “appendix fantasy” -- books so monstrously large they beg for appendixes to keep readers oriented. Patrick pointed out that current books were actually written years earlier, meaning what look like current trends actually past trends.

Overwrought fantasy isn’t their only beef.

“In another week, we could have had a conference table covered with what the Brits would call vampire shaggers,” Patrick said.

“One day I actually had a psychotic break,” Teresa said, describing a pile of story submissions that drove the mild-looking editor to desperation. “I raised a knife and found myself saying ‘die, die, die’!” after reading the same things repeatedly during a perusal of story submissions.

Patrick in particular believes science fiction writers focus on making stories accessible to readers rather than repeating the genre’s clichés. Or as he called them, “tropes,” a more polite term for clichés, he and Teresa both agreed.

“You can either lose the trope or lose the reader,” Patrick said, urging “more science fiction rooted in things we know. There are a number of people in the world who will never understand science fiction or fantasy (but) what I believe is that there are a group of
people on the margins who can be reached. . . A lot of people under age thirty are not going to have any problem understanding science fiction (but) it needs to be rooted in very comprehensible human situations and conflicts.”

Doesn’t that mean dumbing down the hard science involved, an exasperated writer at the recent FenCon writing workshop in Dallas asked.

“What I’m talk about is not dumbing down, not in the least. Accessibility is not dumbing down. . . Entry level science fiction predicates that the reader may not have read five thousand works of science fiction.”

Aside from avoiding clichés, the Nielsen Haydens also recommend avoiding main characters who are depressed. Or passive. Or who spend more of the story’s space reacting to situations instead of being proactive.

(One of the “cheap writer’s tricks” Teresa suggested to improve a character’s likeability was to give him a dog, warning that the dog will then steal all the scenes. For a reader who hoped a character’s horse would provide the same reader sympathy, the answer was, sorry. No other animal has the cachet of a dog.)

As for what an editor wants, for Patrick that means more science fiction submissions. “Everybody intuits that fantasy outsells science fiction. What this means is I never get enough science fiction submissions.” In particular, he’d like to see science fiction with hard science and YA science fiction for boys. And yes, he said, “I’m a sucker for Westerns with science fiction elements.”

And although he admitted Tor’s short fiction list is filled through next summer, he was still willing to take another look at “that brilliant thing I’ve never imagined” -- a story from one of the workshop members.

For more information about Patrick and Teresa’s work, see last Monday’s “What editors know about fixing science fiction,” at this site and www.neilsenhayden.com/.

For guidance on submitting work to Tor, see www.tor.com/.

(Next Monday -- After hitting lists with her novel about the Salem witch trials, Dallas writer Kathleen Kent has a new twist on historical fiction, this time set in Texas.)

Wordcraft -- What editors know about fixing science fiction

As fascinating as the instruction Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden gave their writing workshop at last weekend’s FenCon in Dallas was their interaction -- agreeing and disagreeing, watching each other’s back, passionately and amiably interrupting and finishing each other’s sentences. The two are the editing team of Nielsen Hayden for Tor Books.

At this year’s WorldCon, Patrick won science fiction’s Hugo Award for Best Editor, Long Form (an award he’s won twice previously). A book he edited also won a Hugo this year (again, a repeat performance) as have books edited by Teresa. In addition, they teach writing, acquire fiction for Tor, and Patrick acquires and edits short fiction for Tor.com. I’ll stop with that brief summary and let you read the rest at their website, www.nielsenhayden.com/.

For this post, I’m cherry-picking some of their likes -- and how to match them. Since, as in all FenCon writing workshops, there’s too much information for one post, next week I’ll tell you what they don’t want -- what can drive otherwise mild-mannered editors to undergo psychotic breaks during slush pile forays. And yes, finally I’ll get around to telling you what they actually want to buy.

For starters, writers have heard the advice a thousand of times -- “show, don’t tell.” But face it, sometimes we’ve got to convey chunks of information to our readers. “The trick is,” Teresa says, “you want to look for natural occasions for expositions, the natural places people talk to each other. We (only) understand information in a book because it’s attached to story. If you start telling people things before the story starts, they won’t remember it because there’s no place to attach it.”

One of their suggestions for how to orient readers to our fictional worlds is to follow the example of historical writer Patrick O’Brian -- having a knowledgeable character describe the fictional world to a character who knows nothing about it. Being careful, of course, to attach the explanations to interesting and sympathetic characters.

What about another admonition writers hear repeatedly, to start a story with action? “It’s a general statement that’s a couple of occasions away from being true,” Patrick says.

“You can start a story with having somebody set fire to their yard,” Teresa says, “but the next thing that happens better be related to the yard burning.” Otherwise, readers simply become baffled by why they are being giving information without context or attribution. And if readers, like all of us, don’t care, they won’t remember.

What about those strange alien names in our science fiction and fantasy? “Don’t,” Teresa says. In fact, “Don’t try to throw in many strange words of any sort.”

“These are all rules you can break --” Patrick says, before Teresa cuts him off with, “Here’s the ultimate writing rule -- if it works, it’s right.”

And what another perennial problem of science fiction -- explaining how technology that doesn’t yet exist works? “A general rule for writing about how something works,” Teresa says, “is, do not explain. That just invites the reader to argue with you.”

Instead, “explain how it feels,” Patrick says. (Although both Nielsen Haydens keep
a sharp lookout for the illogical, which they’ll discuss in a later post.) Their suggestion is to use what they call a “hand wave” to avoid dwelling on more detail too soon than readers need. Instead of explaining how a worm hole, for instance, works, just say it works and concentrate on side issues such as how long it takes, how it feels, how much freight it can handle.

“Reading is a light trance state,” Teresa says. “Which is why excessive detail doesn’t work,” Patrick adds.

So how much detail is enough? “If your readers are nitpicking the scenery, the train isn’t going fast enough,” Teresa says. Or, instead of showing the details themselves, show the character’s reactions to them. Or, “If you’re having trouble describing something, crop down and describe only part of it. If that doesn’t work, crop down further. And stop short of the inevitable conclusion.”

“The reader will be so invested in it,” Patrick says.

(Next Monday, Team Nielsen Hayden’s dislikes, including people who don’t understand that they both have the same surname, Nielsen Hayden, spelled without a hyphen.)