Tag Archives: Robert A. Heinlein

Authorial Reticence—Why Writers Hold Back

You’re asking if you read that subject line correctly. Hold back? Aren’t writers supposed to explain things? Aren’t they supposed to…you know…write to be understood?

I’d never heard the term ‘authorial reticence’ until last weekend, when I listened to author Michael Scott Clifton talking about it at a conference.

He spoke on the subject of ‘magical realism’ and dropped ‘authorial reticence’ on his audience. Intrigued by his description, I decided to blog about it.

Definition

Most often associated with magical realism, authorial reticence refers to a writer refraining from explanations about a fantastical setting or event. The story proceeds as if the astounding, magical thing happened every day. This encourages the reader to accept it and keep reading.

Antonyms

If that seems confusing, it might help to understand the term by exploring its extreme opposites. Think of a story where the author used an As-You-Know, Bob or an infodump to give a detailed description. Or consider a story where the author wrote out the moral. In each case, the writer took you by the hand and told you what to think.

Authorial reticence is the opposite of that.

Example

Authorial reticence can apply to sub-genres beyond magical realism. A classic example from science fiction occurred in Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Beyond This Horizon with this three-word sentence: “The door dilated.” No further explanation or description. Heinlein expected readers to form the mental picture, accept it, and read on.

Pros

Done well, this technique fosters engagement on the part of the reader. The author says, in an implicit way, “I trust you. If you’ll go along with me, I’ll entertain you without moralizing or boring you. No spoon-feeding, though. You may have to stretch your mind beyond normal credibility limits.”

Benefits include a shorter, tighter story that highlights action and drama. Readers get a sense of being welcomed into your story’s world, as if they’ve lived there for some time. Also, readers who feel trusted might well buy your other books.

Cons

Like any good thing, you can stretch authorial reticence too far. Throwing too many bizarre or fantastic elements in at once can confuse a reader, who now will be less likely to finish the story, or buy another.

Also, if you fail to establish authorial reticence in your writing style at the story’s outset, introducing it later can prove jarring.

Reticence and Me

Given my engineering training, I suffer from a tendency to over-explain. I fear the reader might not form an accurate mental picture, or might reject my story element as too far-fetched. I’ll strive to resist this impulse. I’ll try to trust the reader’s imagination to fill in gaps.

From now on, if you’re looking for authorial reticence, you’re looking for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

September 22, 2024Permalink Leave a comment

After Your Great Idea – the Difficult Part

Got a great story idea, have you? All that’s left is to type up the words, send them to a publisher, and start spending all that advance money, right?

Not so fast.

First, I suggest you read this wonderful guest blogpost by author Elizabeth Sims, posting on Jane Friedman’s site. Sims gives indispensable advice about how to convert an idea into a story. I’ll give my own spin on her guidance below, but her post explains it in more detail.

She describes four techniques to use. You may use them singly or in combination. Sims says you can take your original story idea and bend it, amp it, drive it, and strip it.

Bend It

Take your idea and shape it into something worth reading. Alter it nearly beyond recognition. Change it in ways that make it more exciting and dramatic. Isaac Asimov read The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon and imagined the decline and fall of a future galactic empire. He bent the idea further by adding an advanced science called ‘psychohistory’ which predicted the fall of the empire, then wrote his Foundation Series.

Amp It

Your story idea includes some characters with goals, motivations, and problems. Okay, now crank up the volume. Make the goals nearly unreachable, the motivations into obsessions, the problems nearly unsolvable. Raise the stakes. Frank Herbert dabbled with growing mushrooms and enjoyed watching the moving sand dunes near Florence, Oregon. From those interests came Dune, a novel of prophesies, magic, royal family destinies, drug-induced mental states, treachery, self-doubts, and impossible odds.

Drive It

Carry your story idea to extreme ends, ultimate possibilities, and previously unexplored realms. Where ‘Amp It’ has you elevating internal character emotions and personalities, ‘Drive It’ is where you supercharge the plot. Disgusted by what he’d read of the communist Soviet Union, George Orwell took that as a starting point and drove it toward the bitter and dismal future of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Stalin became Big Brother. Secret police became ubiquitous spy cameras. Propaganda became the language of Newspeak and the concept of doublethink. Soviet slogans became “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.”

Strip It

If your idea gets too big and the novel threatens to overwhelm you, cut it down to size. Readers can’t keep track of an entire world, but they can follow a single character. If you portray that character well enough, readers will understand the metaphor—through that one character, you’re representing many. Angered by a newspaper advertisement urging the U.S. Government to unilaterally suspend testing of nuclear weapons, Robert A. Heinlein could have taken Tolstoy’s War and Peace and set it in outer space. Instead, for Starship Troopers, he wrote a stripped-down version, describing an interstellar war from the perspective of a single soldier in the Mobile Infantry.

Now that you have Bend It, Amp It, Drive It, and Strip It in your writer’s toolkit, take another look at your story idea. Just think of the possibilities, all because you read this post by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 6, 2021Permalink

Clean Fiction? What, Did it Wash its Hands?

You’ve been hearing the term ‘Clean Fiction’ and wondering what it means. That questioning mind of yours shall soon be satisfied. Or, perhaps, left even more confused.

Apparently, ‘Clean Fiction’ doesn’t require you to physically wash a book in soapy water. My bad.

The clearest definition of the term is: fiction both young adults and mature adults can enjoy.  

In these pandemic times, with parents spending more time at home with children, sometimes home-schooling them, there’s a hunger for such stories. For that reason, the Story Quest Academy has been championing the cause of clean fiction.

From a writer’s point of view, how do you write a clean story? How does such a story differ from an unclean one?

I recall reading where Robert Heinlein said writing for young adults (called ‘juveniles’ in his day) was the same as writing for adults, you just take out the sex and swearing. The dozen ‘juvenile’ novels he wrote, though dated, remain readable and exciting today.

He warned writers against talking down to teenagers. If you think they aren’t ready for deep themes, long words, mild violence, or literary symbolism, you’re underestimating them.

These days, you could even leave in some mild swear words. Today’s YA audience has heard them.

Author Allison Tebo makes some interesting points about clean fiction in this post. Writing clean fiction, she says, forces you to be a better writer. You can’t fall back on sex or swearing to hold the reader’s interest. The action, dialogue, and word choices in your story must step up to do that.

Moreover, Tebo states that clean fiction is more likely to become classic fiction than typical adult-only fiction is. By appealing to nearly all age groups, a clean story become more universal and welcoming. If it is good enough, it may well become a classic, enjoyed for generations, even centuries.

Like Tebo, I grew up reading and loving clean fiction. Nearly all the science fiction I read was clean. In fact, teenagers were perhaps the main intended audience for that genre.

My own fiction tends toward the clean side. Exceptions include my horror story, published as “Blood in the River” and later, with alterations, as “Moonset.” Ripper’s Ring contains violence teens might find upsetting, though it’s not graphic.

If you go looking for my stories, many appear in anthologies along with tales written by other authors. In general, those stories, too, are clean, with the exception of those in the horror anthology Dead Bait.

I guess you could say I’ve been writing clean fiction before it was a thing. Creating stories so clean you could wash your hands with them, I’m—

Poseidon’s Scribe

April 4, 2021Permalink

Stepping on the Moon…Again…Someday

As you may have heard, July 20, 2019 marked fifty years since a human first set foot on the Moon. What follows is one fiction writer’s perspective of that event.

Neil Armstrong on the moon

I was eleven years old then, and watched the landing on my family’s small black-and-white TV. I stayed awake to watch the “first step” too, though it occurred close to 10 pm central time. There was no way to watch that live event and not feel pride and awe. Even those who balked at the mission’s expense knew how historic it was.

Fiction writers had long been imagining the moment, and had prepared us for the wonder of it. From Lucian’s True History, to Rudolf Erich Raspe’s Baron Münchhausen’s Narrative of his Marvelous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” writers had taken us to Earth’s silver satellite in our imagination.

Later science fiction writers gave the trip greater clarity and realism in such works as Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon, and Robert Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold the Moon.

As a writer of historical technological fiction, I’ve written of flights to the moon occurring before 1969 as well. In “A Tale More True,” a rival of Baron Münchhausen travels to the moon in 1769 using a gigantic clock spring. In “To Be First,” my characters from an alternate Ottoman Empire are returning from the moon in 1933 when the action starts. And in “The Unparalleled Attempt to Rescue One Hans Pfaall,” you can read about Dutch citizens traveling to the moon by balloon in the 1830s.

Although fiction writers helped us imagine the first trips to the moon, nobody prepared us for a five-decade lapse in missions. Nobody in 1969 thought we’d finish out the Apollo series of moon landings, and then stay away for over fifty years. If you could travel back in time from 2019 to 1969 and tell that to the world, not a soul would believe you.

The moon was ours! Surely by 1979 we’d have a moon base, then by 1989 a moon colony, and by 1999 the moon would be our springboard for trips to asteroids and other planets. The excited folks of 1969 would inform the time traveler that by 2019, naturally, average families would take trips to the moon for vacations.

How odd that we’ve stuck to our planet and near orbit for close to forty-seven years (since Apollo 17). Historians may well wonder what took humanity so long to go back, given the advances in technology that have occurred since the early 1970s. Here are some possible reasons for the long gap:

  • The Mercury/Gemini/Apollo series ingrained in the public mind that only governments can finance moon missions, and only at colossal expense.
  • The moon wasn’t that exciting, after all. Gray, dusty, airless, and lifeless, it was a place only an astronomer could love.
  • The war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal shattered the public’s former confidence in government’s ability to accomplish great tasks.
  • We’d gone there to accomplish the late President Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade, and to win the supposed ‘space race’ with the Soviet Union. With no further goal, schedule, or apparent rival, we’d lost all impetus for further trips.

We’ll go back to the moon, of course, and with any luck, the next lunar landing will be witnessed by you and by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 21, 2019Permalink

Bending Heinlein’s Rules

You submitted your story to a market and the editor rejected it. Should you edit the story before submitting it elsewhere? Some say yes and others say no. Let’s examine both schools of thought to see what’s best for you.

Last week I blogged about whether to write many stories fast, or take the time to perfect fewer stories. That prompted a Facebook discussion with a fellow author who makes quick edits to every rejected story before submitting to other markets. He said he sees flaws to fix each time.

At a critique group meeting this week, another fellow author asked, “After how many rejections should you consider editing a story?” I said, “I’ve heard of stories getting upwards of 70 rejections before getting accepted, so ask me again after you hit 70 rejections.” Here’s a fun list of well-known books that many editors rejected before acceptance occurred. Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance took the prize at 121 rejections.

Another fellow critique group member said she has edited stories after rejections, but only to fit the rules of a particular anthology she’s aiming for.

My glib response at the critique group meeting stemmed from my understanding of the Rules for Writing Fiction, developed by author Robert A. Heinlein.

Of interest, Heinlein and I graduated from the same institution, a few years apart. Both of us ended up writing fiction. There, any similarities end, I’m sorry to say. I still aspire to attain a fraction of his writing skill.

I’ve blogged about Heinlein’s Rules before, but I’ll list them again here:

  1. You must write.
  2. You must finish what you write.
  3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
  4. You must put the work on the market.
  5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

I interpret Rules 2, 3, and 4 to mean you finish a story to some level of satisfaction, submit it to a market, and upon rejection, immediately submit it to another market (without editing), and repeat. If an editor says she’ll accept it with some rewrites you find acceptable, then and only then do you edit the story.

Others interpret RAH’s Rules differently. Robert C. Worstell says Heinlein’s Rule 3 discusses rewriting, which is different from (and more extensive than) editing. In other words, he believes minor editing doesn’t violate Heinlein’s Rules at all.

Let’s summarize the thinking behind both schools of thought:

  • The Always-Edit School. Don’t keep throwing a bad story at different markets; you’re wasting your time. What if your story is just a few edits away from being great? It doesn’t take that much time to re-read a story and correct the errors you see before sending it out again. As your writing matures, you’re improving your older stories with each edit session.
  • The Never-Edit School. Have some pride and faith in your stories. Time spent re-editing old stories is time not spent on your current Work in Progress (WIP). All that editing is slowing you down. What if your edits are making the story worse?

Which school of thought should you join? I offer the following questions to answer as you make your choice:

  1. Can you spare the time to re-read that story and edit it?
  2. Have you received rejection letters with suggestions for improvements (admittedly rare these days) and do those suggestions make sense?
  3. Are you sending the story to an anthology, and will it require editing to meet the antho’s submission guidelines?
  4. Has the story received more than X rejections, (where X can be 20, 30, or any value you choose) and you’re running out of pro and semi-pro markets to submit to?

The more of these questions get a ‘yes’ answer, the more you should consider re-reading and editing the story before you send it out again.

I don’t take this bending of RAH’s Rules lightly. After all, he’s Heinlein, and I’m just—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 1, 2018Permalink

Connessione

Together, you and I have arrived at the end of this seven-part series of posts. We’ve been working our way through the principles in Michael J. Gelb’s wonderful book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci. For each principle, we’ve been exploring how it relates to fiction writing.

The last principle is Connessione: a recognition and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena—systems thinking.

ConnessioneLeonardo had a fascination with the connections between things. He’d study how a tossed stone caused expanding circular ripples in water. He wrote, “The earth is moved from its position by the weight of a tiny bird resting upon it.” His notebooks were a disorganized, chaotic stream of consciousness, as if his mind would flit from one thing to a seemingly unrelated thought. In a strange echoing of what we might consider Eastern philosophy, he wrote: Everything comes from everything, and everything is made out of everything, and everything returns into everything.”

In what ways should a writer of fiction embrace the principle of Connessione? Here are some that occur to me:

  • When you’re thinking of plot ideas for stories to write, look for separate ideas from the world around you and connect them. To pick just three examples of this, consider how Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series combines the ideas of TV reality shows and war; how Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein combines Tarzan, Jesus, and Mars; how Herman Melville’s Moby Dick combines whaling and obsession.
  • Think of the interconnections between characters within your stories. For characters A and B there are (at least) four connections: how A feels about B internally, how A behaves toward B externally, and the same internal feelings and external behavior of B toward A. Now imagine three, four, five, or more major characters and convey, in your story, the rich web of interconnectedness between them all. This alone will be the subject of a future blog post.
  • Your stories have an internal, systemic structure. They are a connection of related parts. The chapters (or sections) are themselves composed of scenes, and build on each other to form the integrated whole of the story.
  • The story element of theme is a connection between concrete things in a story to abstract ideas in real life. Similarly, the techniques of metaphor and simile are connections in the form of comparisons—relating something you’re describing in your story to something familiar or understandable to the reader.

See? If you write fiction, you must embrace the notion of Connessione to some extent. In fact, it helps to practice all seven principles— Curiosità, Dimonstrazione, Sensazione, Sfumato, Arte/Scienza, Corporalita, and Connessione. Perhaps you’ll not become as well remembered or universally admired as da Vinci, but you can think like him, and write fiction as he would have. That’s the aim of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 11, 2015Permalink

12 Reasons to Change Your Name

Pen NamesAs a writer of fiction, you might choose to be published under a name other than your real one for a variety of reasons. The use of pen names, (or nom de plumes, literary doubles, or pseudonyms, if you prefer) is not uncommon. Although I’ve blogged about one reason for pen names before, I figured I’d provide a more comprehensive list of reasons today.

• The first three on my list have to do with Branding.
1. To separate your books into different genres or types or styles. For each name, readers know what to expect.
2. To give the reader the impression the book is an autobiography. You can adopt a character’s name as your pen name, as Daniel Handler did by choosing Lemony Snicket as a nom de plume in A Series of Unfortunate Events.
3. To share the same pen name with other authors, making it seem like a book series was written by one person. With the Tom Swift series of children’s books, several authors wrote under the single pen name, Victor Appleton.

• You may have reasons to shield your true identity.
4. To keep your real name in reserve until you’re a more established author. Eric Blair used the name George Orwell for this purpose, though it’s not clear what he was waiting for!
5. To protect your reputation. As a don at Oxford University, C. S. Lewis got published under the names Clive Hamilton and N. W. Clerk for this purpose.
6. To maintain your privacy. Enough said.

• There may be problems with your real name.
7. To choose a name more appropriate to the genre you write in. Pearl Grey chose the pen name Zane Grey for his Westerns.
8. To present yourself as the other gender. As a woman, you might feel your military adventure novels would sell better with a man’s name as the author, and similarly for you men who write romance novels.
9. To enable readers to more easily pronounce your name. Face it, some names are difficult to say.
10. To distinguish yourself from someone else. Your real name might spell or sound like another person (or thing). The British statesman and author Winston Churchill always wrote under the name Winston S. Churchill (I know, not much of a pseudonym) to avoid being confused with the then-famous American author Winston Churchill.

• Sometimes the publisher has reasons for suggesting a pen name.
11. To enable several of your stories to appear in the same magazine. Thus Robert A. Heinlein became also Anson MacDonald and Caleb Strong to avoid the appearance that a single author was monopolizing that issue.
12. To keep from saturating the market. If you write very fast, publishers might fear the public will see your name too often and tire of your novels too quickly. For this reason, some of Stephen King’s books were published under the name Richard Bachman.

Sure, there might be additional reasons for using a pen name. You don’t really need a reason, after all. It’s a personal choice and nobody’s business except yours and the publisher’s. (You’ll want your publisher to know your real name so they send those huge advance and royalty checks to the right account!)

Other good sites or blog posts that list reasons for pen names include this one, this one, and this one.

Oh, yeah, in case you were wondering, my real name isn’t—

Poseidon’s Scribe

September 14, 2014Permalink