R4SFF

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Creative Artists Giving Away Their Work

There is an ongoing debate among creative artists of all sorts, including SFF writers, as to when it is OK to "give away" their work without compensation. This debate recently came to a head again with two recent posts by artists.

First, Wil Wheaton of Star Trek: The Next Generation and The Big Bang Theory fame sounded off in a blog post you can’t pay your rent with “the unique platform and reach our site provides”. In Wheaton's case, he complained about an "offer" from The Huffington Post to reprint a blog post he had written entitled Seven Things I did to Reboot my Life. Although excited by the possibility of reaching a large audience, Wheaton was less than enthused by their refusal to pay for the work with their approach to him including the following:

Unfortunately, we’re unable to financially compensate our bloggers at this time. Most bloggers find value in the unique platform and reach our site provides, but we completely understand if that makes blogging with us impossible.

Wheaton's response on twitter was

Writers and bloggers: if you write something that an editor thinks is worth being published, you are worth being paid for it. Period.

This advice applies to designers, photographers, programmers, ANYONE who makes something. You. Deserve. Compensation. For. Your. Work.

After all, as he mentions in his blog post on the subject:

Huffington Post is valued at well over fifty million dollars, and the company can absolutely afford to pay contributors. The fact that it doesn’t, and can get away with it, is distressing to me.

Second, following the announcement that the World Fantasy Convention is seeking designs for a new trophy (after the old H.P. Lovecraft one was abandoned in light of his disgusting racist past) but was not offering financial compensation, the artist John Picacio posted Artists Beware calling on all artists to boycott the process. In his mind, the process is "predatory" and that promises of "exposure" and "prestige" are not enough compensation. As for what would be acceptable compensation, he wrote:

It’s a convention with assets, even if it doesn’t want to compensate artists with money. It could have compensated all professional 3D artists who submitted ideas with a membership to a future WFC. It could have compensated the winning sculptor with a lifetime WFC membership. It could have found any number of creative solutions.

I expect that the WFC will offer something like this very soon.

Unlike The Huffington Post, the WFC is not a highly valued company. Rather, it is a volunteer run organization that does not make profits (although I do not think it is a registered non-profit) which relies on its members participation. As a result, Picacio's post attracted a lot of negative comments on his facebook page. Irene Gallo (of Tor Books, and of Hugo Awards controversy fame) directed people to www.shouldiworkforfree.com which lays out very limited conditions under which giving away your work is acceptable.

Naturally, if a person wants to be a professional creative artist, they have to sell their work at some point. But I can think of many good reasons for giving away your work for free, including the prospect of getting exposure for a new artist trying to break into the field. Whether to donate work is ultimately up to the artist and they should do whatever seems right for them.

However, it is important to keep in mind that calls for artists not to give away their work are not entirely free from bias; they are not always the "public service announcements" that established artists claim them to be. Make no mistake: some of the hostility from creative artists to giving work away for free stems from a fear that this will eat into their own earnings. After all, why should publishers pay top rates to an established artist when you can get a similar (even if slightly inferior) work for free from a newcomer? For established artists, these pleas not to give away work are attempts to form and enforce a cartel aimed at raising prices. And as usual with cartels, the incumbents stand to gain while newcomers will lose.

Of course, this all relates to the question of how to run a short fiction SFF (or literary) magazine. As I have argued elsewhere on this blog, the economics of this market makes it very hard to pay authors professional rates. Quite simply, the demand for short fiction is limited, while many, many authors are supplying works of short fiction. This naturally tends to drive the price---the compensation offered to authors---down. I've argued that the future of short SFF requires a new business model, perhaps along the lines of that used by academic journals (in some disciplines) and I've seen nothing since to lead me to change my views.

Sunday, November 22, 2015

Saturday, November 21, 2015

On Getting and Giving Critiques

The blog Book View Café has a post about the role of criticism in the writing process by Mindy Klasky entitled C is for Critique. The focus is on criticism an author receives from a "critique partner" defined as:

trusted individuals who read and evaluate a book it’s in a final state. These people go by many other names—you might call them your beta readers, or your critique group, or your writers group. Most authors have more than one critique partner, and they learn different things from different critics. One partner might excel at catching plot mistakes, gaps in storytelling or oversights in timeline that destroy the credibility of a story. Another partner might be best at noting character inconsistencies, those times when an author makes a character do something completely unexpected, solely to advance a plot. Yet another partner might point out factual mistakes or grammar errors or any of a million other details that keep a book from being its best.

Ideally, an author assembles a team of critique partners who address all these areas, along with any other known weaknesses.

Much of the post is bout how an author can shape the critique process to be most beneficial:

There are multiple methods for receiving criticism (most of which are designed to minimize the sting.) Some authors conduct all critique work online—they submit their files electronically, and they receive comments electronically. That computerized distance translates to an emotional distance. The author can temporarily stop reading criticism if it becomes difficult to process. She can rant and rave in the privacy of her own home, without building permanent barriers to communication with her critique partners. This method, though, can lead to a lack of understanding; without direct time-synced communication, the critic and the author might inadvertently be at cross-purposes.

Other authors conduct critique work in person, at weekly or monthly meetings. Many of these sessions follow a workshop model, where each member of the critique group presents his comments within a limited time period (for example, three minutes.) During that presentation time, the author must remain silent (except, in some cases, to ask for a clarification of a specific point.) The author then has a limited time period to respond to all the issues raised. This method allows each critic and the author to present points in a planned, methodic fashion. It also reduces purely emotional responses. This method, though, requires real-time communication, either in person or through an electronic tool such as Skype. It also requires restraint on all parties, who must stick with time limitations and speaking restrictions.

Yet another model involves direct, ongoing exchanges between the author and his critics, without limitations on time or subject matter, either in person or by a Skype-like tool. Critics and the author make statements and ask questions without restraints on time or subject matter. This method allows everyone to flesh out ideas more completely—critics can state their problems with a work, and authors can delve more deeply, pinpointing specific issues. This method, though, has the potential to dissolve into debates. Aggressive critics and defensive authors can quickly derail the effectiveness of direct, unlimited communication.

There is also advice on how to give critiques:

Begin with a general introduction. This is the place to state that you’ve never liked farmboy-saves-the-world epic fantasy novels so your comments should be taken with a grain of salt, or you had a bad experience at a high school pep rally so you have trouble finding a gym teacher a sympathetic heroine. Put your own biases on the table to allow the author to better understand your critique.

Move on to positive statements. What works in this book? Why? Always find something positive about a work, even if it’s the formatting or enthusiasm of the author.

Follow up with critical statements. What needs work in this book? Why? Start with larger topics (“this romance novel has no conflict between the hero and heroine”) and end with smaller topics (“the White House is on Pennsylvania Avenue, not Connecticut Avenue.”) Consider grouping smaller topics into catch-all paragraphs (“Geography: review a map of Washington DC to double-check locations for the White House, the Capitol, and the Convention Center.”)

Present potential fixes as suggestions, rather than as mandatory statements. (“Consider making the heroine a blind orphan to heighten the tension with her fellow boarding school students” instead of “Make Sally blind.”) If you don’t have a potential solution to a problem, admit as much.

Critique partners offer authors valuable insight into what works and what does not work in a book. Sometimes, that criticism is directly on point—the mere statement of the problem is enough to help an author see what needs to be fixed. Other times, an author concludes that a critic is mistaken—she doesn’t understand the book, or she isn’t familiar with a particular sub-genre, or she was having a bad day as she wrote her criticism. Even in those cases, the rational writer considers the criticism as a warning that the reader was pulled off track at that particular point. Often, a critic finds fault with a particular aspect of a book (e.g., “your heroine sounds whiny when she talks to her best friend”) but an author discovers a completely different fix (e.g., the heroine shouldn’t be talking to her best friend in that scene; instead, she should be taking steps to solve her problem more directly.) Critics aren’t omniscient, but they can be good barometers of when a story succeeds.

I thought this was pretty interesting, especially as it compares and contrasts with what I do editing and reviewing academic papers, as well as to preparing book reviews on this blog.

When reviewing an academic paper, it is typical to prepare a letter to the editor (not seen by the author) that discusses in a frank (and occasionally brutal) way the strengths and weaknesses of the article, as well as a report to both the editor and author. I typically write my reports along the lines advocated above. I start by briefly summarizing the work and placing it into context (for the benefit of the editor, who is usually not a specialist in the precise subfield). I follow it up with some comments about what the paper did well, and then describe any problems I found on a macro level. I then delve deeper into any of those problems, suggesting remedies when I know them, and then follow that up with some miscellaneous smaller criticisms.

Just like with any other form of writing, it is important to know your audience. As an editor, I want a no-nonsense and frank evaluation of a paper's strengths and weaknesses. If the recommendation is to publish the paper after revisions, then I want to report to be constructive and as specific as possible as to what type of revision is required. As an author, I want criticism to be constructive.

When reviewing fiction for this blog, my audience is other readers and fans of SFF. I would not mind if an author read something I wrote and it influenced them, but that is not why I write (I don't even write reviews in the expectation that they will be read). And so I do not write my reviews in the same way that I would offer a critique to an author desiring feedback. Rather, I write them more along the lines of an editors letter.

Friday, November 20, 2015

Mike Carey on Genre vs Literary Fiction

Continuing with the recent theme of authors defending genre fiction from literary snobs (see my posts on ), a couple of weeks ago I noticed a post by Mike Carey, author of the Felix Castor novels, works for comics publishers Marvel and DC, as well as the “literary zombie” novel The Girl With All the Gifts. The article posted at The Norwich Radical was entitled Literature vs Genre---Seconds Out (Part 1).

Recently, Part 2 of this article was published and so I thought it opportune to review the arguments raised.

Carey starts by noticing that this ongoing debate is pretty one-sided:

One thing you tend to notice after a while, though: it’s almost never writers of genre fiction who are picking the fight. To be fair, it’s often not “literary” writers either – it’s academics taking up the cudgels on their behalf; considerately telling us which stories are worth serious consideration and which aren’t. And I guess we appreciate the help, right? Because it’s a bewildering fictional landscape out there and an innocent young seeker after truth could easily go astray.

He then goes on to illustrate this with the example of Jonathan Jones attach on Terry Pratchett in The Guardian, which we have talked about recently. He then talks about an example from last year:

Last year it was Oliver Burkeman’s turn to tell us – I’m assuming with a straight face – that one way to “be a smarter reader” and “get more from what you read” is to stick to literary fictions. Why? Because a “well-designed study” at a US social research think tank (it’s Kidd & Castano if you want to look it up) found that literary fiction produces more powerful emotional identification with its more fully rounded characters and has a lasting effect on your ability to empathise with others.

The relevant section of Burkeman’s little how-to guide is called “Keep it Literary” – building on the most tendentious of Kidd & Castano’s five linked experiments, in which subjects read selected passages from either literary or genre fictions and then performed a range of tests designed to measure their empathy. The smoking gun here is “selected passages”. The experimenters hand-picked texts which they felt exemplified the differences between the two kinds of text, which is a little like marking the deck before you do a random shuffle. Six passages in all, by the way – three from genre fictions and three from the world’s canonically great literature – so this generalisation about all literary fiction and all genre fiction is based on about a millionth of a per cent of each. And despite being able to skew their sample in this bespoke way, Kidd & Castano reported differences between test and control groups that were barely larger than the margin of error. Mark Liberman dissected these procedural inadequacies very thoroughly in the Annals of Overgeneralisation on Language Log, and he was far from the only one.

So a spurious claim is being worked up out of a flawed study that seriously over-sold the significance of its findings. You can’t help but feel that there’s an agenda here, or at least a presumption – that literature has merit and that what has merit is by that same circular definition literature.

He has some other examples:

Other writers have been less coy about saying exactly this. Here’s Arthur Krystal, writing in the New Yorker in 2012:

“Genre” is not a bad word, although perhaps the better word for novels that taxonomically register as genre is simply “commercial.” Born to sell, these novels stick to the trite-and-true, relying on stock characters whose thoughts spool out in Lifetime platitudes. There will be exceptions, as there are in every field, but, for the most part, the standard genre or commercial novel isn’t going to break the sea frozen inside us. If this sounds condescending, so be it.

and

I hate to rake up ancient history, but here’s another example from a little further back – dredged up because in this case it is a writer of literary novels (Edward Docx, in the Observer in 2010) who’s saying this, so the agenda is maybe a little more naked.

Even good genre… is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the material. That’s the way writing works and lots of people who don’t write novels don’t seem to get this: if you need a detective, if you need your hero to shoot the badass CIA chief, if you need faux-feminist shopping jokes, then great; but the correlative of these decisions is a curtailment in other areas. If you are following conventions, then a significant percentage of the thinking and imagining has been taken out of the exercise. Lots of decisions are already made.

Carey begins his rebuttal with the last of these:

Yes, of course there are constraints when you write genre fiction. There are also constraints when you write literary fiction. Totally unconstrained writing would be (to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut) gibberish interspersed with exclamation marks. When you write – when you write anything at all – you write on the end of a tether. But it’s a flexible tether, and it’s all about the dance you perform on the end of that thing and how you work with it or strain against it or in some cases tie it into knots that were never seen before.

And then, referring to his own novel, The Girl With All the Gifts

If Docx’s thesis is right, the fact that I was working in a space that had been partially defined for me should have robbed whatever I produced of all or most of its potential value. I think the opposite was the case: being coaxed out of my comfort zone made me take creative pathways I’d never noticed or thought about before, and the results were unexpected and exciting. I realised almost as soon as I’d sent the story in that I couldn’t part company with Melanie so soon. I’d inadvertently written the first few scenes of a much larger narrative. There were events that hadn’t eventuated, other characters waiting in the wings, and a box (Pandora’s) that had finally to be opened.

The constraints were liberating, and believe me when I say that I speak as someone who has no interest in bondage.

Carey then revisits the debate on why some classic works are not considered "genre" pieces despite having all their trappings, as with Hamlet and Macbeth, despite having ghosts and witches in them. aren’t genre fictions, and both were unapologetically designed to get the crowds into the theater.

Lastly, he ends up quoting on of my favorite writers:

If I’m honest, I tend to see the entire “literature versus genre” debate as a dead horse so cruelly and relentlessly flogged that it isn’t even vaguely horse-shaped any more. It lies in a neglected corner of the academic meadow close to the intentional fallacy and the vast midden of post-modernism. But since Mr Burkeman has tried to put a saddle on it, I felt it was probably worth offering an opinion (“It is an ex-horse. It has ceased to be…”). And on top of that, to slip in a reference to one of my favourite writers and her eloquent rebuttal of this whole daft non-argument. I’m referring to Ursula LeGuin, who in the introduction to The Left Hand Of Darkness laments the tendency of people who don’t like or get science fiction to pronounce (ham-fistedly) on what science fiction is and does. Along the way, she has this to say about the relevance and importance of her chosen genre:

All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life – science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.

A metaphor for what?

If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words.
I like this formulation very much. I seldom write pure sci-fi, but LeGuin’s words apply just as well to horror and dark fantasy and probably to serious-minded works in any genre. I also like T.S.Eliot’s famous dictum about everything you write being “a raid on the inarticulate”. A genre is a tool you pack and carry along when you go on one of these raids. It takes it place – its honourable, earned place – among the other tools of the writer’s trade.

All-in-all, another well argued response to the dismissal of genre fiction. But also a reminder that many writers working in SFF have a (well deserved) chip on their shoulder.

Thursday, November 19, 2015

Tolkien Scholarship

Following on from Ursula Le Guin's discussion of academic treatments (and the scorning) of Tolkien, Norbert Schürer has published an article in the Los Angeles Times Review of Books titled Tolkien Criticism Today.

As Schürer sees it, scholarship on Tolkien has struggled to find a path between recognizing the difficulty of the literature:

ON THE FACE OF IT, J.R.R. Tolkien’s works are not exactly easy reading. The Hobbit veers between childish asides and grandiose battles; The Lord of the Rings trilogy presents 1,000 pages of unrelenting heroism; The Silmarillion makes the Bible look like easy reading — and this doesn’t even begin to consider The History of Middle-Earth, the 12 volumes of manuscript variants compiled posthumously by Tolkien’s son Christopher. Furthermore, much of Tolkien’s work is written in an indigestible faux-medieval style; there are long descriptions of imagined countrysides, and he sprinkles in countless obscure references to invented fantastic histories.

and the popularity of the works:

Tolkien is nonetheless one of the most popular authors of the 20th century. In poll after poll, readers declare him their favorite writer; his main books remain bestsellers 60 years after their publication, and the recent movies based on his works are box office hits. On a superficial level, Tolkien’s success is easy to explain: He offers timeless stories about hard moral choices, and he creates a marvelous world of magic, including talking eagles, walking trees, and hobbits — invented figures with whom many contemporary readers can easily identify.

As he says it, scholars face a difficult trade-off:

On one hand, critics do not want to be seen as fawning fans, so their writing adopts a scholarly tone. On the other hand, they want to appeal to fans, so they have to cater to popular sentiment. They need to address controversial topics, but they cannot attack the author if they want to find readers among fans, and while they often try to address the entirety of Tolkien’s published imaginary writings (known as the legendarium) they can only rely on readers being familiar with The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and often only in cinematic form.

As a result, he concludes that Tolkien scholarship is in a sad state. He then goes on to review seven recent works of Tolkien scholarship, and comes away unimpressed for the most part.

The best of the seven, he argues, is A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Stuart Lee, and published by Wiley Blackwell. The next best, the essay collection Tolkien: The Forest and the City:

these books show the two requirements for good Tolkien criticism. For one, he should be treated like any other author in being discussed in seriously peer-reviewed journals and established academic presses rather than in essay collections and niche publications. Just as importantly, Tolkien should not be treated with kid gloves because he is a fan favorite with legions to be placated, but as the serious and major author he is.

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

David Mitchell on Literary vs Genre Fiction

David Mitchell is an unusual author. He has been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 3 times, shortlisted twice, and was also the author of Bone Clocks, which recently won the World Fantasy Award. His recent novel, The Slade House, is a haunted house story. As such, he is uniquely qualified to speak on the separation of literary fiction from genre fiction, a topic that has been of substantial interest to me on this blog (see my posts on the views of C.S. Lewis, Terry Pratchett and Ursula Le Guin).

In a recent article in The Guardian, based on a Wired podcast and entitled David Mitchell: separating literary and genre fiction is act of 'self-mutilation', he spoke at some length on this topic. The title pretty much sums up his views, but I think the arguments are worth repeating.

He starts by listing some of his childhood influences, listing Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin (I recently reported on David Mitchell's stirring tribute to Ursual Le Guin's Earthsea books), Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, British SF comic 2000AD and EE “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series. These were all books I read as a child, too.

He then goes on to talk about the “ghettoisation” in bookshops:

“It’s convenient to have a science fiction and fantasy section, it’s convenient to have a mainstream literary fiction section, but these should only be guides, they shouldn’t be demarcated territories where one type of reader belongs and another type of reader does not,” said Mitchell. “It’s a bizarre act of self-mutilation to say that ‘I don’t get on with science fiction and fantasy, therefore I’m never going to read any’. What a shame. All those great books that you’re cutting yourself off from.”

He also pointed out that many books accepted as literature, such as Dickens, are “shot through with fantasy” and argued that works that “become sanctified in the canon of English literature, people then forget – conveniently – are what we now called genre”. He listed George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the works of HG Wells and Margaret Atwood. I would add Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, much of magical realism, and many, many others.

He also had a lot to say about Kazuo Ishiguro’s distancing of his novel The Buried Giant from the fantasy label (for which he was criticized by Ursula Le Guin):

Mitchell said he admired both writers. On Ishiguro – and those readers and critics who also sought to downplay the fantasy elements in his novel – Mitchell said: “There was just this big, big, big brouhaha in the press. In the admittedly tiny corner of the press that the book world occupies, there was this, ‘How dare he? Has he lost his marbles? What does he think he’s doing?’ A lot of people just didn’t get it. But this is what the book wants to be. You’re personally entitled to not like the book because you don’t think it works, you’re allowed to not like the book because you don’t get on with his style of writing, you don’t like the book because of its absurdity or strangeness – but don’t not like it because it’s got a dragon in it!”

Le Guin remains a personal favourite: “I visit Earthsea about once a decade, and I read myself when I’m there – my earlier selves, reading them as a boy of nine, as a teenager of 15, as a young man of 26 or so, as a writer of 35, and as a person who re-read them to write an introduction to the Folio Society’s recent hardback reprint of A Wizard of Earthsea. So it’s kind of come full circle.”

I've not read any of Mitchell's works, but will seek some out in the near future.

R⁴SFF