Tag: style

Five Things I Learned From Reamde

As far as I can remember, this is only the second Neal Stephenson book I’ve read. The first was Snow Crash. As you’d expect from books written twenty years apart, they’re quite different. From this admittedly tiny sample size, I get the impression that Stephenson has undergone the same transformation as William Gibson, from cyberpunk science-fiction to stories that interpret current technology through a futurist lens: stories that say, ”it’s hard to believe it, but these things could happen today.”

Reamde is a book about ransomware, money laundering through MMORPGs, the Russian mob, and Islamic terrorists in China.

1. Style is an Engine of Story

Sentence-to-sentence, Reamde is a fantastically well-written book. Stephenson’s prose reminds me of literary fiction, because it was just as critical to my enjoyment of the book as the characters or plot. However, the style is very different. It’s not lyrical, it’s clean and precise, but that doesn’t make it any less captivating.

The best way I could describe it is that it feels like walking through the story with Terminator vision—everything overlaid with little details, and targets zooming in to focus your attention on important things.

There are many engines that can power a story, and a strong style like this is a great one, if you can manage it. Since it’s all about how you say it, not what you’re saying, it layers nicely with other engines.

2. Eschew Unnecessary Detail

The level of detail used to describe something—a place, a character—can be an important cue to the reader. Describing something in detail indicates its importance, and explicitly limiting that detail shows a lack of importance.

At one point in the book, some characters meet the pilots of the private jet they will be riding on. The pilots’ introduction is sparse: “He greeted the pilot by name.”

The pilots are necessary to the plot, so they have to be mentioned. Stephenson could have come up with a throw-away name, but this gets across the message just as well. It’s a clue that the pilot will only be relevant for a short while. The reader doesn’t have to worry about remembering the name of yet another side character.

When characters are going to be important (or at least stick around for a while), Stephenson makes sure to introduce them in a way that reveals one or two interesting physical characteristics and something that reveals a bit of their personality. This makes them instantly memorable.

The other great use of this technique is to add detail to accentuate things that will be important to the plot. It’s like a miniature “gun on the mantle.” If you spend time describing a key and a padlock, that lock ought to be important. If you leave garbage out in the forest to attract dangerous animals, some dangerous animals had better show up at some point.

3. Coincidences Strain Believability

Incredible coincidences or lucky breaks aren’t unusual in action/suspense stories like this, but they have to be used carefully.

Reamde’s plot really kicks off with one such coincidence, and it results in several characters getting mixed up with the Russian mob. To me, a crazy coincidence works great as an inciting incident.

Where coincidences start to chafe is when they’re used to repeatedly ratchet up the tension, or even worse, to resolve a problem.

There’s an egregious example of this at the end of Act I of Reamde, where everything that happens in the latter 2/3 of the book hinges on a group of hackers who just happen to live in the same run-down tenements as a terrorist cell. In a city of millions.

There are other examples as well, including several chance meetings among the large cast of characters that end up being vital to the plot later on, and many of the characters being players of the in-story MMO, T’Rain, so that there’s always someone available to log on when it becomes relevant to the plot again.

When I got to the part where bad guys were killed by a cougar, I had to stop reading and look up the stats on cougar attacks. Then I just threw up my hands and accepted that this is what I signed up for. That’s not the kind of reaction you generally want from a reader.

4. Beware Pet Characters

Stephenson is deeply in love with Richard “Dodge” Forthrast. He’s the cool, smart guy who gets along in any social strata and knows all the things. He’s a former pot smuggler turned Silicon Valley CEO. He’s bored of being a billionaire, because he’d rather be out solving some new earth-shattering problems. He is the Golden Boy caricature that people like Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos try to project.

Even in a life-threatening situation, he’s having fun, practically on vacation. It’s really only at the very end of the book where he shows any amount of fallibility. Of course, he makes up for it by being the guy who saves the day.

The strangest thing of all is that this is really not his story. Although the perspective jumps around, the bulk of it is from the perspective of Zula, his niece, and she’s the one with a character arc and the most to lose. Yet the story starts and ends with Dodge.

Because Stephenson is a great writer, Dodge is still a fun character, but I’d like him more if he was a little more human and fallible.

5. Structure is a Double-Edged Sword

Like most suspense stories, Reamde has constantly escalating stakes. Every section is essentially “out of the frying pan, into the fire.” Things could always get worse (or worse in a new way).

The danger of this constant escalation is that it can quickly ramp to extremes (and well beyond). It’s easy to jump the shark.

In Act II, Reamde splits many of the characters up into separate groups in their own bad situations. I realized pretty quickly that the rest of the book was going to be about how everyone long journey to end up back together in one place, for the final showdown.

However, wrangling everyone back to the same place, at the same time, requires introducing another round of characters and another handful of helpful coincidences.

This made the second half of the book feel considerably more meandering. When everyone finally arrived at the final showdown, there were so many characters involved and so much to resolve that there were literally 100 pages of running gunfights.

By that time, the story had escalated to such extremes that my reaction to the bad guy’s final defeat was a combination of exhaustion and relief that it was done.

Bookends

It’s been a while since I read a book that was such a mix of joys and irritations. I love Stephenson’s prose, but this book did not need to be a thousand pages or finish with a novella-length series of shootouts.

Reamde was released in 2011, so I’m thinking I’ll pick up Stephenson’s latest novel, Termination Shock, sometime soon, just to get the full “bookend” experience of his career so far.

It’s Not Style Unless Someone Hates It

I recently read The Wes Anderson Collection, and it got me thinking about style.

For the unfamiliar, Wes Anderson is the writer and director of numerous films, and he has a very particular style that can be seen in the art direction, special effects, dialogue, and many other aspects of his movies. He’s a critical darling, and he’s managed to collect an impressive array of well-known actors who are eager to work with him in movie after movie, even in small roles that might seem “beneath” them.

There are also plenty of people who absolutely can’t stand him. They think the dialogue is stilted and monotone, the sets are twee, and the man loves pastels more than the Easter bunny.

Whether you love it or hate it, it’s clear that Anderson has a distinct style.

What is Style, Anyway?

Artistic style is nothing more than a pattern in your work. It might be subtle or obvious, and it will probably change over time.

It’s often hard, as an artist, to be aware of your own patterns—the elements of your personal style. This is one way that feedback can be incredibly valuable. Others will often see patterns you haven’t noticed.

If you have regular readers, ask them about any repeated elements they see in your stories. Those ideas, characters or settings might tell you something about the topics you’re interested in exploring, even if you haven’t consciously realized it.

Digging Into Your Own Head

Style doesn’t have to be entirely subconscious. You can probably identify some elements of your personal style without a reader’s help.

Look at the things you’ve written, and the things you’ve thought about writing. Past writing is a map of the places you’ve been, stylistically, and brainstorms, journals, or half-baked ideas will tell you more about where you might want to explore next.

Know Your Influences

It can also be valuable to look at the work that inspires you. What were your favorite stories growing up? Which books on your bookshelf are well-worn? What about other media?

The most fertile ideas are often the ones that you see in your own work and your favorite stories. You might also find inspiration in non-story pursuits, hobbies, and even “regular” jobs. Life and art often intersect in interesting ways.

Follow Your Interests

The reason it’s valuable to think about your own style is because it will help you shape your stories to be exciting as possible for your primary reader: yourself. It’s a bit of common advice that you won’t get anyone else excited about your work unless you’re excited about it first.

Understand as best you can what thing you want to make, then make deliberate choices that project or communicate that to the reader. Depending on what you like, these choices might be intellectual (references, tropes, allusions, subtext), or emotional (feeling, sound, resonance).

Most importantly, make honest work. It’s easy to shy away from the parts of ourselves we don’t like (or the parts we think others won’t like). But those thoughts and emotions are important aspects of style too.

You have to be true to your thoughts and experiences. Don’t shy away from the unpleasant bits, the cringing embarrassment, the weaknesses. Good characters are usually flawed characters, and authors often need some insight and sympathy for the darker sides of our shared humanity.

Writing With Style

Style often plays out in the choices we make without realizing it. If something feels right, interrogate it. Look inward, and understand your loves, hates, influences, and fears. Play to an audience of yourself.

If you’re honest about the things that fascinate you most, it will help you to write stories you love. And if someone out there decides they hate your style, then at least you know you have it.

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 21

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

Anchor Scenes

When it comes to writing, I am a planner. To a lot of people, that just means having an outline rather than writing and seeing what comes out. However, there are really several phases to planning, especially when it comes to a big project like a novel.

For me, the first phase of planning is really just collecting ideas. There has to be some set of ideas that get me excited enough to say, “Yeah, I want to put hundreds of hours of effort into making this book.” Often, these ideas aren’t enough to provide a start-to-finish synopsis of the story, but they are important moments, so they tend to be the things that cluster around the beginning, the end, or act breaks. Occasionally, they’re just something cool that happens in the middle, and that’s fine too.

That collection of exciting ideas are like mountain peaks in the fog. They’re moments in an incomplete story. To make a real story, I have to figure out all the obscured parts—I have to blow away all that fog in between.

Before I really start to put together a proper outline (and even while I’m outlining), I tend to act out those scenes in my head and think about what the characters might do and say. Sometimes I come back to the same scene over and over and discover new details or different directions they could go.

For Razor Mountain, these were things like Christopher waking up alone on the plane and the moments leading up to jumping out; his journey into the wilderness, and facing the choice of going back to safety or continuing on without any certainty of success; or God-Speaker falling down into the depths of the glacier and discovering that the stone god is broken and he is utterly alone.

A lot of the ideas in this chapter came to me later in the process, but it still feels like one of those anchor scenes. When I first conceived this book, I didn’t know about Chris Meadows yet. I didn’t have a complete understanding of Razor Mountain, and I didn’t know exactly how Christopher would get there. What I did know was that Christopher would have to be broken down completely. He doesn’t know it yet, but this is the experience that allows him to really change.

The rest of the story will be about him figuring out why he is who he is, and whether he wants to do something to change that.

Capturing Dreaminess

I got to play around with style a little bit in this chapter. Christopher is in a dreamlike state, sleep-deprived and tortured on top of everything else that has happened to him since the beginning of the book.

I wanted parts of this chapter to feel more concrete, as though we’re with him in the room, and parts to be more dreamlike, to the point where it’s not entirely clear what is real and what is hallucination, what is memory, and what is happening in the moment.

To make time feel disjointed, I added an unusual number of narrative breaks within the chapter. The story jumps back and forth between (what we can assume to be) multiple interviews with Sergeant Meadows and descriptions of Christopher’s mental state and thoughts. I also used an unusual number of short sentences and sentence fragments in the dialogue and descriptions to show how unfocused and disjointed his thoughts are. A side-effect of this is that longer sentences stand out, and I used that to draw attention to one or two things.

The third trick I used was substituting italics for quotes in some of the dialogue. I think this makes Christopher’s quoted dialogue feel more immediate, while Meadows’s italicized dialogue makes him seem more distant. It also has the side-effect that it’s much easier to follow the back-and forth without any dialogue tags. There’s no description in these parts either—just two disembodied voices—and that also adds to the dreamlike quality.

Finally, I added a section where I switch to first-person for the first time in the book. Honestly, I suspect I wouldn’t have had the guts to try something like this if I hadn’t read and analyzed The Martian and seen how many times Andy Weir jumped between perspectives and tenses, and how seamless it all felt.

I initially tried the change in perspective to untangle some gnarly sentences where it just wasn’t clear which person the pronouns were referring to. However, I kept it because it puts the reader deep into Christopher’s perspective at the exact moment when he is most vulnerable. This is a big reveal of something only lightly hinted at, a key piece of Christopher’s background.

With any stylistic experiments there’s a risk of failure, but I’m happy with how this chapter turned out. I think the experiments paid off.

Next Time

In chapter 22, we’re coming back to God-Speaker, once again leaping ahead through history. We’ll see a formative time in his life, and a little more information about Razor Mountain, the mysterious voices within, and their powers.

Storytelling Class — Style/Substance

Every once in a while, my daughter Freya and I have a “storytelling class.” Really, it’s just a fun opportunity to chat about writing stories. This time, our topic was style and substance.

We always start with two questions: What did we read and write recently?

What Did We Read?

Freya is getting close to finishing the first Wheel of Time book. I asked her if she was excited to continue with a series that has fourteen books. She said she thought she might be 70 before she finishes. She also just started the “Janitors” series, though she hasn’t gotten far enough to form an opinion yet.

I have been working my way through my beautiful new Ambergris hardcover. City of Saints and Madmen was a formative book for me, and I’m excited to now have it in a single massive tome alongside Jeff Vandermeer’s other Ambergris stories. I was however, a little disappointed to find that they actually removed some of the appendices that appeared in the original, so now I have to keep my copy of City of Saints and Madmen as well.

In non-fiction, I started Ways of Being at the recommendation of Cory Doctorow, although I’m only a few pages in.

What Did We Write?

Freya has kept busy writing for school work, and hasn’t worked on any fiction recently. After my Covid break, I’ve been working on getting back into Razor Mountain.

Style and Substance

Each story consists of two parts—two sides of the same coin—style and substance. You can think of “substance” as “what the story is about” and style as “how the story is told.” Substance is the meaning. Style is the actual words. By some definitions, substance is good, while style is just the shallow surface layer. However, when it comes to fiction, each story is really a melding of the two.

Schools of Thought

At the risk of being a little controversial, I’m going to define two schools of thought, and I’m going to call them “genre fiction” and “literary fiction.” I put them in quotes because each story is a special snowflake, and I’m about to speak in broad generalizations, so take it all with a grain of salt.

The “genre fiction” school of thought is that substance takes precedence. Genre fiction sometimes even devalues style. Common genre fiction advice suggests that, when reading a great book, the reader should forget they’re reading and get lost in the story—that is, in the plot and the characters. The descriptive text should become transparent. Authors should endeavor to become invisible, and never call attention to themselves.

The “literary fiction” school of thought holds that style is quality. Literary fiction tends to put a higher value on authorial voice. The advice here is that a great book should be overflowing with the author’s unique voice, and the reader should be transported into the mind-space of the author. Mechanics like plot and character are nice, but they need to be described through transcendent prose. Anyone can tell a story. A true author tells it in a way that only they can.

False Dichotomies

Like most dichotomies, this one is artificial. Style and substance aren’t strictly opposing forces (although they can sometimes fight each other). Some authors make the mistake of crafting page after page of beautiful prose that doesn’t really  tell a story, while others create intricate plots by placing row upon row of flat words like bricks in a wall.

Readers, like authors, are unique, and there are audiences for both of these styles. Science fiction has a big audience that revels in clever plots and is fine with a lack of ornamentation. Likewise, there are plenty of literary fiction readers who care more about delicious sentences than characters who actually go somewhere and do something.

As an author, you can make your own choices about what you value. You may choose to focus on substance, or style, or try to find a happy medium. However, it’s important to understand that there are trade-offs. The more stylized your prose is, the more your reader will have to work to understand what’s going on. Some readers will appreciate the extra layers of complexity, but others simply won’t be interested, and may just put the story down. Focus on style inherently takes some focus away from the substance.

Examples

We looked at a few of my personal favorites when it comes to literary style.

Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide series is a relatively mild example, where most of the stylistic flourishes could be described as “literary comedy,” twisting language for fun and amusement.

Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves is a book with literally complex text that stretches sentences across pages, forms shapes and pictures, and wraps around upon itself. But it is also a narratively complex work, presented by a character named Johnny, who details the work of his acquaintance, Zompano, who himself took detailed notes based on videos shot by a third character, Navidson, whose descriptions of his ever-shifting, labyrinthine, and spatially inconsistent house form the heart of the story.

Finally, there’s Vandermeer’s more recent work, Dead Astronauts, a book that is so dense and challenging to decipher that it almost feels encoded.

These are wildly different examples of a strong authorial voice put to use for different purposes. While Adams is extremely readable, House of Leaves ranges from straightforward prose to deep complexity. Dead Astronauts is lyrical and dreamlike, but so obfuscated in parts that I found it off-putting. And there are many other examples of other authors doing entirely different but equally interesting things with language.

Choosing a Style

Depending on the type of writer you are, you may find that you default more toward one end of the spectrum than the other. There’s nothing wrong with that. Many authors are influenced by their own favorite writers and stories, and you may like to write the same kind of stories that you like to read.

I find that memorable quotes and phrases tend to come from style-heavy writers. Substance-heavy writers tend to make unforgettable stories where you don’t necessarily remember any of the words in particular. I loved The Martian when I read it a year ago. I remember some of the structure (maybe because I blogged about it) but I don’t remember a single line from it.

Sometimes particular stories will speak to you in a certain way. Just because you normally write very straightforward sci-fi space operas doesn’t mean you can’t do a bunch of clever stylistic embellishment in a complicated, self-referential time-travel story.

As with most things in life, it can be good to experiment. You might discover that you can find joy in more kinds of stories than you previously realized. Or you may find that a particular story calls for a particular style.