And since it’s a reasonable time of year for a bit of reflection, here’s a piece I discovered the other day that I reckon is rather well-written, and although it might not be the kind of challenge to our habits and behaviour and priorities that I guess Easter is really meant to be, it’s certainly a challenge.

Not saying whether I agree with some or all of it or not, just that it’s good to read something now and again that makes you think, and this made me think if nothing else: David Cain of Raptitude.com on the subject How To Make Trillions of Dollars. Actually, all of Raptitude.com is nothing if not interesting, provocative and well-written, and it has a handy Best Of page if you want to explore it further. I think it makes really quite appropriate Easter reading, in many ways.

Which made me wonder: how many people remember Harold Lloyd?  A lot, I hope.  When I was a kid, his silent movies – or at least excerpts from them – were on the TV quite a lot.  As were those of Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton.  Thinking about it, I don’t think this stuff ever shows up on ‘mainstream’ TV channels now, does it?  What a shame.  Seeing that stuff when I was young felt perfectly natural, as if b&w silent comedies were just another part of the entertainment spectrum.  Now they’re being forgotten, bit by bit.  Made into a truly niche historical interest.

They deserve better, both the films and the superstar actors who made them.  And Harold Lloyd was my favourite of those actors when I was a child.  Chaplin’s films were too subtle and understated for my simple tastes at that tender age.  Laurel and Hardy were funny, for sure, but even back then I recognised them as caricatures (though I don’t suppose I knew what that word meant!).  Harold Lloyd was different: a real, ordinary guy doing funny things and – most important for the young me – also delivering crazy, crazy stunts and action.  He was, in my very humble opinion, a film genius.

And this is the most famous evidence in support of that humble opinion.  Ten minutes of stuntage, physical narrative, action, clever editing and interesting angles that would look good if it was made today, let alone ninety years ago:

Who needs CGI?  (Honestly, the more time goes by, the more I think CGI is just such an unfortunate development.  Inevitable, unavoidable, but unfortunate.)

Anyway, Harold Lloyd=Genius. I really don’t think there’s much room for doubt.

Monster Talk is pretty much always a fun show, especially if you’re interested in … well, not strictly monsters, but cryptozoological and superntural oddities in general.  All of it seen from a skeptical, scientifically informed point of view.

This time around, though, with the March 20th episode, entitled The Zombie Apocalypse, they’re talking real science and real creatures, and real crazy stuff at that.  Fungi that turn ants into zombies.  Parasites that (this sounds crazy, but it’s actual science) … parasites that live in 12% of Americans’ brains, 60% of French brains (!), and can affect human behaviour.  Rabies as a behaviour-modifying parasite.  All sorts of fascinating stuff.

TetZoo is a new kid on the podcast block, and a rather different kettle of fish.  It’s a pretty full-on zoology ‘cast, going into fascinating detail on all manner of things relating to animals, extant or extinct.  Those with four limbs, anyway, which is why its full title is Tetrapod Zoology.  Lots of serious and (if you’re like me) fascinating science, strange facts about the living world, stuff about dinosaurs and their kin.  Plus occasional discussions of sf and horror movies.  Just because.

But the hosts, Darren Naish and John Conway, are also interested in cryptozoology (approaching it from a scientific, skeptical but not entirely dismissive point of view) so this week for their third episode they produced a looong episode all about bigfoot and the sadly ever less convincing evidence for the big hairy ape-man’s actual existence (not that I ever thought it was remotely convincing, mind you).  All the background you could ever wish for, if you’re curious about what sensible, informed folks think about the sasquatch these days.

And as a side-note, John Conway makes nice pictures.  I think he’d be an interesting choice for anyone looking for an out-of-the-ordinary book cover …

Previous instalments of Perusing the Podverse, wherein I reveal just how odd my listening habits are (and believe me, we’ve only scratched the surface of my podcast addiction so far), can be found here.

Yes, I have yet more reasons why Winterbirth had a somewhat bleak tone to it.  The first of which is …

It wasn’t just a reaction to history, but to the contemporary world.  As I mentioned in Part 1, part of the reason the book/trilogy has the feel it does was my enthusiasm for narrative historical non-fiction, and the notion of borrowing some of its texture to create the illusion of reading about real people in a real world.  It wasn’t just the past of the real world that fed into it, though.  It was also the present when I was coming up with the story.  At the time – at any time, let’s be honest – it wasn’t hard to find dramatic and disturbing things being reported in the news, and the stuff that was at the back of my mind when I was pondering ideas for Winterbirth was the post-Yugoslavia convulsions affecting the Balkans.

Thousands of people were killed there as long-suppressed national, religious and cultural divisions resurfaced.  You could trace back some aspects (not all, by any means, but some) of what was going on many, many centuries.  I was struck by the notion that the present remained a prisoner of the past.  That the capacity for extraordinary and horrible violence remained latent in even apparently ordered societies.  The last bit of the 20th century saw us move away from the long era of vast empires confronting one another on vast battlefields, to one which was more chaotic.  More gruesome in some ways.  Everything looked greyer than it had once done.  Good and evil were more subjective, locally defined, transient qualities.  A lot of evil was going unpunished, in those days.  It always has done, of course; but a pervasive media has made it steadily more obvious.

Obviously you don’t have to write what you see around you, when you’re writing speculative fiction.  But it’s hardly surprising that sometimes people do.

Authorial inexperience.  I mentioned in Part 1 that sometimes an author, especially a novice author, might be making fewer conscious choices, and doing more going with the flow, than readers assume.  Separate but related point: perhaps an inexperienced author isn’t always as fully aware of the tonal effect his or her writing is generating as he/she might be.

I mention this only because I wonder – and I specifically don’t know, can’t remember quite clearly enough – whether I fully understood the cumulative effect of the style in which I was writing the Godless World trilogy.  Some of the small choices I was making.  I’ve got a feeling, and it’s no more than that, that were I writing the trilogy now, I’d probably lighten the tone a little bit.  Reading fantasy of this sort should, after all, be entertaining if nothing else.  It should provide enjoyment, excitement, alongside whatever other responses it’s generating in the reader.

Setting a bleak overlay to the whole thing doesn’t preclude entertainment and enjoyment by any means, but perhaps it does mean that entertainment and enjoyment have to work a bit harder to express themselves.  It’s possible I overdid the bleakness a bit, because my inexperience made it that bit trickier to step back from the day to day business of writing sentences, paragraphs and see the big picture; project myself into the reader’s shoes and visualise the cumulative effect of those sentences and paragraphs.

The thing about violence is …  I’m on thinner ice with this point than with most of the other stuff I’ve mentioned.  I’m not totally sure what I feel about it.  It’s complicated.  But there’s no denying I’ve thought about it, and that I had it in mind while writing the trilogy.

I’m a great big softie.  Never been in a fight in my life, so far as I remember.  Not a big fan of violence in general.  Except in entertainment, obviously.  It makes for exciting books, films, whatever, I do not deny.  But when I really think about it, I can’t get away from the notion that actually, really killing someone with a sword, or an axe, or a spear, is – it must be – by our modern standards an absolutely, horrifically dreadful business.  Cutting, hacking, stabbing a living human being at close range is not romantic or clean or easy.  Any world in which it was any of those things, not just for certain individuals (there will always be some, sadly), but on a widespread cultural level, would be a world I emphatically did not want to live in.

What’s odd, and makes this a bit complicated, is that I’m perfectly happy to watch, or read, and enjoy fictions that to a very great extent sanitize such violence, or revel in it, or completely ignore its inherent brutality. For some reason, when I’m the one doing the writing, things become more problematic.

There is a part of me, I think, that just instinctively rebels at the idea of painting a world in which people habitually kill each other, face to face, with blades as anything other than in some way cruel, bleak and traumatising.  I am, rather obviously, more than happy to write violent scenes.  In fact, I confess I actively enjoy it.  But it’s possible that I’m just on some level not happy, or perhaps not able, to write violent scenes that do not have unpleasant consequences, that do not reflect my personal repulsion at the very idea of killing someone with a sword.  That do not acknowledge that to my way of thinking, any imaginary world in which such violence is necessary on a large scale, or is celebrated, or is treated as normal, is to at least some extent inherently and inescapably grim.  Dark.  Grimdark, if you like.

And that’s a wrap.  Let there be no more talk of bleakness.  It’s the Vernal Equinox, after all.  The first day of Spring!  Sunshine and flowers will be with us any day now.  (But yes, it is true that it is currently snowing outside my window …. ho hum).

And P.S. here’s a random and trivial teaser: the word ‘vernal’ appears a lot in my next book, The Free.

And lo, there came a time when the weather resolved to do just exactly whatever it felt like, irrespective of the long-established norms of socially acceptable behaviour.

And yes, I know I’m supposed to be providing Part 2 of my previous post.  I will.  Any day now, honestly.

If you’re interested, you can sample the back-and-forth with an early salvo, then Joe Abercrombie’s defence of grit, then a mildly derailing discussion thread, then a considered response to Abercrombie’s response.  Etc.  There’s lots more out there.

To none of which I have much to add, except stuff that’s specific and personal to me. Since I wrote stuff – in the form of The Godless World trilogy, starting with Winterbirth – that’s undeniably gritty and/or grimdark (ugly neologism, that) in general terms, it won’t surprise you that I’ve got opinions about some of this stuff.

They’re very much personal opinions, though. They’re not part of an agenda, or a manifesto. They’re not a defence of any other writer or what they’ve written. They’re certainly not a defence of ‘gritty’ fantasy in general, because I have to confess I’ve read very, very little of the stuff. I only know (roughly) why Winterbirth is written the way it is, so that’s the only thing I can talk with authority about. (I realise it defeats the entire object of the internet if people start talking only about stuff they actually know, but there you are.)

One more thing this is not, by the way: an argument for the quality or otherwise of Winterbirth and the rest of the trilogy as books.  It’s only about why I wrote them in the tone and style I did, not whether I wrote the things well.

So why is Winterbirth so bloody bleak? There are quite a few reasons, so I fear this is going to run long …

It just came out that way. Sometimes books, especially I suspect first or early books in a writer’s career, are a bit less considered and controlled than some readers might assume. There’s less conscious choice and more going with the flow happening.

To go back to a basic level, when I started writing stories in my pre-teens, they were all speculative fiction of one sort or another. When I later started writing short stories to try to sell, they were all speculative fiction. When I decided to try to write and sell a novel, it was a speculative fiction novel. In none of those cases did I choose from a wide range of possible ideas or genres; I pretty much had no ideas for fiction that weren’t fantastical or science fictional.

I wrote Winterbirth because that was the novel idea that presented itself. I wrote it in the tone and style I did because that was the tone and style that presented itself when I started typing. I think there were reasons why that gritty tone was what came out, as we’ll get to in all their overlapping imprecision below, but saying that is not quite the same as saying I chose it.

Trying to write a real history of real people. Not literally trying to replicate the messiness or complexity of real world history, but trying to imitate it in broad strokes. Why? Because I had been reading – still do, in fact – a lot of historical non-fiction. Mountains of the stuff. And I had been deeply, and consciously, struck by the dissimilarities between most secondary world fantasy fiction and real world historical non-fiction. The radical simplification (and to some extent cleanliness) of psychologies, conflicts, societies, histories that seemed to be present in some epic fantasy, especially of the 70s – 80s, compared to the moral ambiguity, messiness and general intricacy of real history.

Simplification serves its purpose when one is trying to create the impression of myth or folktale. I wasn’t inclined to do that. I was after the feel of history, because, to be honest, I was at that time more interested in reading about history than about myth. And my impression of human history is very much that it’s more often than not about psychologically complex people doing complex things for complex reasons. And that there’s a lot of grit involved.

Fostering immersion by analaogy with the real. So I had an instinct to write in a style that borrowed from certain aspects of the real world’s history. (Only certain parts, clearly). But I did also have in mind a sort of minor experiment.

I had personally lost interest in epic fantasy fiction at some point, in large part because I no longer found it nearly as immersive or engaging as I had in my youth. One reason for that was that I found it ever less easy to care about or be interested in characters and plots that ceased to seem plausible to me in psychological, cultural or moral terms. As I got older I, like many of us, became more sensitive to the complexities and grey areas in our own world and lives, and I saw very little of that reflected in epic fantasy. Quest fantasies involving contests between objective good and objective evil just no longer did it for me.

I could see, in the 90s, that secondary world fantasy was moving in a direction that did interest me more, through the work of folks like Guy Gavriel Kay and George R R Martin. I started to suspect that fantasy written in a style that echoed in some way the intricacies and texture of real history had much, much more potential to be a fully immersive experience for readers like me (not all fantasy readers by any means), by virtue of precisely that echo. It was emphatically not about actually trying to replicate the full spectrum of historical experience, but about trying to remove barriers to reader immersion by imitating some aspects of it and thereby trying to sell the reader on the illusion that they were reading about real people with real problems.

So part of the reason I approached Winterbirth vaguely as if I was writing a real history of real people was a conscious experiment to find out if that did create a more engaging, immersive experience for some unknown subset of the reading audience.

The real past was bloody miserable.  Most secondary world fantasy, if it’s going to borrow from any real world history, is going to borrow from pre-modern history of some era.  Now if – as I was – you’re consciously trying to replicate some of the texture of that history, how you perceive it’s inevitably going to colour the tone of the fiction you write.  I fully acknowledge that the distant past is a veritable rainbow of experiences, with an abundance of light to offset the dark.  Nevertheless, I’m personally satisfied that by comparison with the present state of much of the world the past was in certain important respects a harsh, grim and often brutal place.

Inter-personal violence was, I’m reasonably convinced, more frequent and extreme.  The violence of authority (or what passed for authority) against its own subjects and against external bodies was more frequent and extreme.  The value set on individual human life was lower, or at least thought of significantly differently.  The circle of empathy was, in general, more restricted, with sameness being more narrowly and otherness more widely defined than is broadly the case today.  I could go on and on.

None of that means that I think fantasies which borrow from that past should replicate its bloody miserableness.  Not at all.  It merely means that I, as an individual writer, who was borrowing from the past and consciously trying to replicate some of its texture ended up with something pretty bleak and miserable in part because my entirely personal opinion is that any empathetic contemporary observer of the lives most of our ancestors lived would be downright apalled by the suffering that was tolerated and inflicted.

Reaction against past fantasies.  This isn’t a complaint about pre-grit epic fantasy in any way.  It’s an observation about the inherent and undeniable fluidity of trends, styles and approaches in any creative medium.  ‘Gritty’ fantasy is recognisable as such only in contrast to ‘non-gritty’ fantasy.  In some sense, it couldn’t exist if it hadn’t been preceded by stuff that created a style from which it could diverge.

As I said above, I frankly lost interest in epic fantasy for some time.  It was only the early stirrings of gritty that brought me back to the genre as a reader, let alone a writer.  GRRM is the obvious, and oft-cited, forefather of all that is grit, but for me personally, my first sense of it came earlier, with Guy Gavriel Kay.

Nobody could accuse Kay of writing the sort of grimy, violent fantasy that many of the tone’s critics would define it as, but nevertheless I saw in his books much that would come to influence the way I wrote Winterbirth.  A turning away from notions of unnuanced good and evil.  A gradual deepening and layering of the psychologies at work in the characters.  An explicit turning towards real world history as the model for fantastical tales.  Cautious steps, in other words, towards a sort of psuedo-realism in secondary world fantasy; an inclination to write history instead of myth.

Personally, I was absolutely writing in some sense in reaction to my memories of early commercial epic fantasies, which had lost my interest.  Inevitably, because they had lost my interest, I wasn’t going to replicate their tone and style.  I was going to do something slightly differently, and folks like Kay and Martin had planted some ideas about what that ‘different’ might look like.

I personally find, incidentally, the distinction between the imitation of myth and the imitation of history a much more interesting way to think about trends in secondary world fantasy writing over extended periods than focusing on comparative levels of violence, grit, swearing, dirt, bleakness etc. etc.  So much so I might even get around to doing a separate post on it some time.

And … this is all getting a bit out of hand.  I’ve still got two or three more, decidedly significant reasons for Winterbirth‘s bloody bleakness just off the top of my head, but enough’s enough for now.  I shall pop back up to the post title and stick a Part 1 in brackets and maybe … perhaps … get back to this and round it off in a day or two.

Yesterday, not so much:

It’s on the cusp of a change in season that the world – certainly its weather – feels most alive. Outside the Tropics, anyway. It’s in those days and weeks when change is running strong and urgent. But it’s seldom a simple, smooth change. There’s always a day, at the start of every season, when you wake up, step outside and instantly just know from the feel of the air that a new time of year is upon you. Each season has an unmistakable feel, which you lose the habit of while the other three are cycling through, so that when it comes back, and you feel it on your skin again, it’s instantly recognisable as different from what’s gone before. I love it when that happens.

Except sometimes things go backwards, of course. Last couple of weeks, it was unmistakably feeling like Spring. A freshness to the air, a deeper blue to the sky, a hint of genuine warmth in the sunlight. Here we are today, though, and I wake up to ice, crunchy snow left over from yesterday’s falls. And though the sky’s a luminous blue, the only thing really deep about it is the cold. I don’t mind. I like it, in fact. Two steps forward, one step back. It’s good to be kept on your toes.

It’s not just the weather, though. All things, all systems, are a their most vigorous, unpredictable, energetic, rich on the cusp. In their transitional states.

It’s true of the natural world in many profound and interesting ways. By education and inclination, I’m in large part a biologist, environmentalist, naturalist, whatever you want to call it, and it’s striking how much of that stuff is concerned with boundaries, states of change, cusps. One example: the physical spaces where one kind of habitat merges or changes into another – like woodland, say, giving way to grassland – often hold the richest, most diverse wildlife in any given area, and are often the most dynamic and changeable zones in that area. It’s such a significant effect, there’s even a special word for these transitional zones: ecotones.

Ecotones are bits of land that are physically transitional – or on the cusp, if you like – between two states. The weather’s currently in a temporal ecotone, if you ask me.

And it’s true of all things, isn’t it?  The most interesting, diverse stuff is often in the borderlands.  Fictions that combine two genres into something rich and different from either.  Communities that merge into one another (peacefully, hopefully) and in those places where they merge perhaps have the best of both worlds.  The border between town and country, where you have both the comforts and ease of the urban and the space and air of the rural.

Ecotones.  Maybe not the most comfortable, but perhaps always the most interesting places, times or states to be in.

I was re-reading bits of one of the most interesting comics ever published the other day.  It’s called Understanding Comics, and it’s by Scott McCloud.  It’s a book about comics in the form of a comic, and for those of us who like the comics medium, reading it can be a bit like having a light going on your head. It’s a textbook, a manifesto, a meditation, an analysis, a history.  It explains a lot of what makes comics remarkable and different, and a lot about how they work.  If you like comics and haven’t read it, I prescribe an immediate trip to the library or bookstore to see if you can get your hands on it.  It’s called Understanding Comics and it really can change the way you understand comics.

But that’s beside the point. There’s a lot of Understanding Comics that’s of relevance to any kind of creator, not just those making comics.  What struck me in particular was one statement in the book, and how I might spin it into something worth saying to aspiring writers:

Ask any writer or filmmaker or painter just how much of a given project truly represents what they envisioned it to be. You’ll hear twenty per cent … ten … five … few will claim more than thirty.

That right there is, I think, both profoundly right and perhaps just a wee bit wrong. I’ve written one or two short stories for which I’d probably claim a bit more than 30% accurate representation of what was in my head. You can argue about the merit of what was in my head, of course, but for better or worse what ended up on the page was at least halfway there. I’ve got a feeling there are not a few creators of one sort or another around who’d happily claim over 30% for their stuff.

But broadly speaking? Sure, writing fiction is a tremendously disappointing process. A lot of it is about trying to manage and minimise your own failure in conveying the visions, the ideas, the themes, the sheer wonder that’s sitting right there in your head. Any writer who has high aspirations for their output – I don’t mean financial aspirations, so much as those relating to craft, art or communication – should probably try to get their head around that fact.

Because it’s not a bad thing. It’s not actually about disappointment or failure. It’s just a recognition that all those involved in the creative arts are, in some sense, attempting the flat-out impossible. As Scott McCloud says:

Media convert thoughts into forms that can traverse the physical world and be re-converted by one or more senses back into thoughts.

That right there is a next to impossible ask. Information, sensation, precision, texture is all going to be lost in the process of converting intangible, unbounded mental processes in one unique mind into limited, defined words. It is next to impossible to create a full, precise, unambiguous verbal representation of the infinite complexity of what is happening in your head. And however much of it you do manage to get down on paper is then going to be re-converted into mind-stuff by the reader. Frankly, it’s a miracle we manage to make this whole thing work as well as we do.

None of us, except perhaps I suppose a theoretically possible but improbably lucky few, will ever achieve 100% successful transcription of the magnificence inside our heads. We will fail. In some part, we will fail every single time we sit down to write. I know I have. McCloud again:

The mastery of one’s medium is the degree to which that percentage can be increased, the degree to which the artist’s ideas survive the journey …

And that’s what I’ve got to offer for aspiring writers: You are going to fail. You will never quite reproduce the wonders in your head on the page. Failure is not something to fear, or get hung up about. It’s an inherent part of the process. Pretty much everybody else is failing as well, whether they admit it or not. Your mission (My mission!), should you choose to accept it, is to aspire to fail less. To narrow the margins between what’s inside your head and what’s on the page.

Chances are, you’ll never hit that 100% mark, but there’s a wonderful thing about writing (and, I assume all the other creative arts and crafts): the more you practise, the more you do it, the closer you get. Your percentage will increase, and all you have to do to make that happen is to keep writing, and to take seriously the business of trying to write better.

Believe me, every few ticks upward in that percentage don’t feel anything remotely like failure or disappointment. They feel like gradual, immensely satisfying, success.

P.S. Yes, this post too is a failure. It was brilliant when I first thought of it. One of the best blog posts ever. Not so much now, huh? But it’s fine. Onwards and upwards!

I’m gradually getting in to the swing of the Twitter thing, so if you’re so inclined please do stop by @Brian_Ruckley and hit the Follow button.

I have not entirely switched my virtual allegiance, so the Winterbirth page on Facebook is still ticking over very nicely.  I have a half-formed idea to do a little signed book giveaway over there if and when the number of folks attached to it hits a certain arbitrary (and top secret!) number, so feel free to go add your Like to the number if you wish.  You never know, you might push the total over the edge …

Coming soon here – i.e. in the next day or two – a post with the working title ‘Everything I’ve Ever Written is a Failure’.  Sounds cheery, no?