Author: David Steffen

David Steffen is an editor, publisher, and writer. If you like what he does you can visit the Support page or buy him a coffee! He is probably best known for being co-founder and administrator of The Submission Grinder, a donation-supported tool to help writers track their submissions and find publishers for their work . David is also the editor-in-chief here at Diabolical Plots. He is also the editor and publisher of The Long List Anthology: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List series. David also (sometimes) writes fiction, and you can follow on BlueSky for updates on cross-stitch projects and occasionally other things.

Wicked or Oppressed: Humanity Through the Eyes of Sweeney Todd

sweeney For those of you who haven’t seen Sweeney Todd, as either the movie or the play, be warned that there will be plenty of spoilers following. FULL SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

First, it’s kind of funny how I first heard of Sweeney Todd. I first saw it in the Ben Affleck/Liv Tyler movie Jersey Girl. In that movie there was a parent/child talent show where each pair was asked to choose a song to perform and act out for the school. Everyone but Ben Affleck and his daughter performed “Memories” from Cats. So after hours and hours of replays of the same song, these two go on stage and perform “God, That’s Good!”. On the upper tier of the stage, the barber Sweeney Todd cuts the throats of customers, who then fall through a hole in the floor and are served as meat pies to unsuspecting customers in Mrs. Lovett’s restaurant to dispose of the evidence.
If you want to see that video clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkLSFdvrhq0

Anyway, the details of the story FULL SPOILERS AHEAD are this:

I’m assuming that you all have seen the story. If you want to remember the details, here’s a link to a Wikipedia synopsis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweeney_todd

In the song “Epiphany”, Sweeney states his view of mankind:
“They all deserve to die. Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why. Because in all of the whole human race, Mrs. Lovett, there are two kinds of men and only two. There’s the one stays put in his proper place and the one with his foot in the other one’s face. Look at me, Mrs. Lovett, look at you. We all deserve to die. Even you, Mrs. Lovett, even I. Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief. For the rest of us death will be a relief.”

His simple bimodal distribution of humanity is very apt for the play. Only a few characters violate this description, and those are the most remarkable characters. Here’s an analysis of all the named characters in the play, classifying them as the Wicked and the Oppressed:

First, the clean cut ones:

Mrs. Lovett (played by Helena Bonham Carter in the movie):
Definitely Wicked. She’s the one who suggests putting human meat in her pies. She also deceives Sweeney, leading him to believe that Lucy is dead so that she can seek Todd’s love for herself. You can’t get much more wicked than that.
Dies by Sweeney’s hands for her crimes.

Judge Turpin (played by Alan Rickman in the movie):
Definitely Wicked. He wrongfully imprisons Barker to get at his wife. He exploits Lucy to the point that she attempts suicide. He imprisons Johanna and tries to force her into marriage. Rich man, and civil officer, taking advantage of decent people–definitely wicked.
Dies at Sweeney’s hands.

Beadle Bamford (played by Jamie Campbell Bower in the movie–you may know him as Wormtail/Peter Pettigrew in the Prisoner of Azkaban)
Wicked. He seems to have a pretty good life. Though he lives under the command of Judge Turpin, he doesn’t really seem to suffer for it. He’s well-dressed and happy enough. He helps Judge Turpin in his unethical actions. He’s wicked, though not to the extreme of his employer.
Dies at Sweeney’s hands.

Signor Pirelli (played by Sacha Baron Cohen in the movie)
Wicked, though he’s the least wicked of the wicked. A rich man, very well dressed, who exploits the general populace by pretending to be Italian and selling them overpriced barber services as well as selling them “miracle elixir” that’s supposed to grow hair, but is really just a mix of urine and ink. Tries to blackmail Sweeney.
Dies at Sweeney’s hands.

Lucy Barker
Definitely oppressed. Her husband is wrongfully imprisoned, then she’s relentlessly pursued by a man in power, then exploited, then takes poison, but doesn’t die. She ends up brain damaged and begging on the streets.
Dies at Sweeney’s hands.

Now for the dual case:

Benjamin Barker/Sweeney Todd (played by Johnny Depp in the movie)
These two sort of follow the rules, if you consider multiple personalities to be different people. I think that Barker/Todd really believe their statement that there are only two kind of men. Benjamin Barker is the oppressed man who lost his wife and child. Desperate for revenge, but unable to bring himself to it, he creates another persona: Sweeney Todd. Sweeney Todd is more than capable of enacting revenge on the judge, but he’s incapable of compassion and more than willing to commit mass-murder.
dies at Toby’s hands

And the really strange cases. Interestingly, the strange cases are the ONLY people who survive:

Toby:
Transitions from neutral to Wicked. His life at the beginning isn’t particularly terrible. He has a home and a job being a crier for Signor Pirelli. If I remember right, he’s a rescued orphan so his life is looking up. After that he’s taken in by Mrs. Lovett who treats him like a son. He’s suspicious of Sweeney, but they manage to coexist until near the end when Toby discovers what Todd and Lovett have been up to. He’s lurking in the sewers beneath the basement when Mrs. Lovett is killed. After that, he creeps up and kills Todd while Todd is cradling Lucy’s dead body. Murder at such a young age seems like it will make him wicked for sure.
She is still alive at the end!

Johanna:
Transitions from Oppressed to Neutral. Her life at the beginning is terrible, forced to live with Turpin as he tries to force her to marry him. But Anthony comes along and rescues her. In the end they run away together. You could argue that she’ll be Oppressed for the rest of her life because of childhood trauma, but I like to think there’s a happy ending there.
She is still alive at the end!

Anthony:
He is the most unique character, arguably the hero of the story. He is neither Wicked nor Oppressed at any point in the play. He does not perform any actions to hurt other characters, but he does not allow himself to be pushed down by other characters either. His actions only have good effects, allowing Johanna to be free, and absolving Todd’s guilt to know that his daughter will be in good hands.

Judging by all of these things, I think the story is told from Barker’s point of view (hence why most everyone fits so neatly into the two categories). In this story, Anthony is the hero because he saves Todd’s daughter.

If anyone has any thoughts on this analysis, I’d be glad to hear them! 🙂

The Runelords by David Farland

I’m currently reading The Runelords, novel 1 of the fantasy series of the same name written by David Farland (aka David Wolverton).

Some of you may know the author from his “Kick in the Pants!” email-blog. He periodically sends out emails that give tips on writing, getting published, and dealing with the industry. They’re very informative and well worth the time. If you are interested, just email dwolvert xmission.com (with the replaced with an @ sign, and say “Kick me!”

Anyway, since I started writing 2 years ago, I haven’t come across a single novel I enjoyed. I’d been starting to think that by learning to pick apart my own stories critically that I’d rendered myself unable to enjoy other people’s novels.

So I was very glad to realize that I was thoroughly enjoying this one. I’m about halfway through–I’ll try to write up a full review when I’ve finished the book–and it’s been great every step of the way. Some of the early chapters have some passages approaching info-dumps that may be a little bit out of character POV, but the information they provide is interesting and pertinent enough that it didn’t really bother me. There’s also occasional head-hopping, but again, it was done in such a way that it didn’t bother me.

The most interesting thing for me in those early pages was to hear about the magical endowment system–this isn’t a spoiler, you learn of this very early on. Through this, any person can endow another with their own attributes, such as wit, brawn, grace, sight, etc… The giver of the attribute finds themselves completely without that quality, while the receiver finds their attributes increased by that much. So a wise man can give his wits to another, the giver becomes a drooling husk, unable to even control his own bowel movements, while the receiver becomes that much smarter, able to remember more things and puzzle out difficult problems. The link lasts only as long as the two people live–if the giver dies, the receiver loses that endowment. If the receiver dies, the giver returns to normal. In this way, the people who have received many endowments must protect their Dedicates (the ones who gave them endowments) in order to protect their own abilities.

The implications of the Endowment system are major plot points that help keep every twist and turn interesting. At times, the story seems like it follows a common fantasy style, but just as I settle in to get comfortable, Farland takes a common idea and twists it to make it his own. The writing and plot are excellent and I would recommend this book to anyone.

“Deep Moves” by William Highsmith

Abyss and Apex has a story I particularly liked this month by William Highsmith. I tried to give this one a critique before it was published, but I enjoyed it so much that I really just enjoyed it the way it is. It’s a quick read, chock full of emotion and story, and it’s also free! I hope you enjoy and let me know what you think. 🙂
,Dave

http://www.abyssandapex.com/200904-deep.html

Article: Submitting to Literary Magazines 101: Professionalism

Topic discussing a blog post: Submitting to Literary Magazines 101: Professionalism.

http://ptbertram.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/submitting-to-literary-magazines-101-professionalism/

I came across this link on Facebook, and followed it out of curiosity to see what they had to say about the “rules” of submitting to literary magazines. Interestingly, what Pat Bertram claims are the rules of the submitting to literary violate what is common knowledge for speculative fiction magazines. Listed below I listed the major differences I noticed. “Literary” refers to the comments entered by Vince Gotera (though he may not speak for the entire genre, he speaks as though he does).

1. Cover letter
Literary: The cover letter should be entertaining and chatty–no publication history. This one surprises me. After all, editors have a lot of work to do, right? Wouldn’t they rather get down to business instead of reading a chatty cover letter that has no bearing on the submission itself?
Spec Fic: Bare bones, only what’s useful, publication history if you have one, otherwise just a title and word count.

2. Font
Literary: Use Times New Roman because it’s easier to read. Do NOT use typewriter fonts like Courier.
Spec Fic: The industry standard manuscript format is Courier. The reasoning I’ve heard is that it’s easier to estimate the space require to print the story with a monospaced font.

3. Pen names
Literary: frowned-upon, though the reasoning seemed more opinion than based on any sound reasoning.
Spec Fic: use them if you want, why should the editor care?

This raises a couple questions for me:
1. what do you do when you submit to a magazine that considers itself both literary and spec fic?
2. Does this guy actually speak for the whole industry?

Revision Methods

An open question for everyone: what method do you use for revisions before you decide something is ready to be submitted?

1. Rough Draft. Write the first draft as fast as it will come out. Details may not be consistent between beginning and end, some of the scenes may not flow correctly into one another, some major continuity errors might exist, as well as grammar and spelling errors. I try not to edit too much at this stage, as it makes the whole process take many times longer. But this draft has an attempt at a beginning, an attempt at an end, and some series of (perhaps disjoint) scenes that lead to the end.
2. Continuity Revision. Read through everything, looking for inconsistencies. Cut unnecessary scenes and resolved conflicting information. Make sure the scenes make sense in the order that they’re in there and that the action moves logically from beginning to end. When this draft is done, I have a story that makes sense, but is maybe not very easy to read.
3. Flow Revision. I read through again, looking for ways to improve the flow of the story. This includes adding beats to dialog to adjust pacing, adding some scene descriptions, trying to convey the emotions the character is feeling in each section, and looking for awkward sentences. Try to get the minute details of the beginning and end just right.
4. Recital Revision. I read it outloud (or at least under my breath). No matter how hard I work on the earlier revisions, I always catch errors here. This makes it much much easier to find awkward sentences, subtle grammar errors, and minor mistakes.
5. Give to First Readers. I give it to a few people whose critiquing opinions I trust. Exactly who I give it to depends on who I’ve been interacting more with lately, who I’ve read stories for (I prefer to trade rather than one-sided critiques) etc… I read the critiques as they roll in and mark comments into the draft document so they’re easy to look at later.
6. Post-Reader Revision. I carefully consider all the comments that my First Readers make. I never use all of them, but I’ll think very hard about which ones I agree with, and will make the changes as I think are necessary.
7. Post-Reader Recital Revision. Another outloud read to catch any mistakes I may have added.
8. Send it out!
9. If I get a form rejection, I go back to step 8.
10. If I get a personal rejection with some ideas why they didn’t accept it I go back to step 6.

Lately my rate of completing new stories has been very low. My current work in progress (a retelling of the Wizard of Oz) has taken a long, long time, much longer than I’m used to. I’ve been working on it for nearly 3 weeks, and I’m now about halfway through stage 2. Stage 1 took most of that time, partly because it was just a really long story, and partly because I’ve been very busy with the end of the semester approaching.

The Shining (book) by Stephen King

the_shining To bring the topic back to reading/writing after a couple days of gaming posts, I just put down The Shining. I realize this book is decades old, but I’m just working my way along my bookshelf, overflowing with many books both new and old that I haven’t gotten to yet.

This was my first time reading this book. It’s the story about Jack, an author who takes a job as a winter caretaker at a hotel in Colorado called The Overlook. he brings his wife Wendy and his 5 year old son Danny there to live with him during this time. They know they’ll be isolated over the winter, but what they don’t know is that the hotel seems to have a life of its own. Especially to son Danny, who has “the shining” which is a pretty word for some degree of psychic powers. Danny is especially sensitive to the dark manifestations of the building. Over the course of the winter, the hotel turns them against each other and they’re faced with ever-more terrifying ghosts of the building.

This story is one of those rare cases where I liked the movie better than the book. Not the original Jack Nicholson movie, but the miniseries starring Steven Weber in the 90s. I’ve yet to see a Nicholson movie I liked (to be fair, I haven’t seen some of his more famous ones like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).

For one thing, the head-hopping really drives me nuts. Just when I’m getting close into one character’s head, the viewpoint jumps into another character’s head, then another and another. It keeps me from feeling really close to any of them (perhaps that was the intent so I don’t have to feel too close to Jack the psycho).

SPOILERS ahead for anyone, though I’m sure most people have seen some version of this already.

I couldn’t even finish the book. I had 180 pages left and I realized that reading it had become a chore, so I just put it down. From what I remember of the Weber series, I thought Jack was portrayed as being a pretty sympathetic character at the beginning of the movie. So his gradual descent into psychosis is a major change, and is quite frightening. But in the book, it’s made very clear very early on that Jack is going to snap sooner or later. Two years ago before the book started he broke Danny’s arm in drunken anger. He’s since quit drinking, but he has a history of manic violence even when sober. The reason he was looking for the caretaking job is that he lost his job as a professor because he was he assaulted a student, beating him bloody in the parking lot of the school.

Since the student incident, he has a tight reign on his temper. He’s still an angry person, but he balls all the anger up inside. Like a tightly wound spring, it’s only a matter of time before something snaps. He would’ve snapped eventually, regardless of circumstances. The Overlook may have accelerated the process, but even without that, he would have totally snapped in a year or two anyway. Especially since he has a knack for self-sabotage–any time things are looking hopeful in his life he ruins the chance in a completely avoidable way (the assault on the student being just one of these).

Maybe 1/3 of the book is spent in his head, which was a mistake–I can’t relate to his character in the slightest between the self-sabotage, the anger issues, the abuse, and the developing psychosis.

Then there’s Wendy, who is quite frankly, TSTL (too stupid to live). She knows about Jack’s history, and his mental instability even when he was sober. Her first mistake was staying with him for so long. If it had only been her own life at stake, I might forgive that–love can make a person do stupid things. But her son’s life is at stake here. But the much larger mistake is for her to agree to live with them at the hotel for that whole winter. She’s aware it will be stressful–she worries about “cabin fever” several times, but she knows Jack well enough that she should be able to predict his snapping a long time ahead of time and she should have run like hell. But either she’s just unbelievably dense or is just a tool of the author and nothing more.

Another 1/3 of the book spent with her, who gets herself and Danny into this mess, I can’t relate to her at all.

The remaining 1/3 is spent with Danny, who I can relate to and who I really liked. He can read minds to some extent, so he gets glimpses of his parents’ thoughts and intentions. He’s the first to see manifestations of the hotel, because of the shining, and his viewpoint is at once terrifying and reminiscent of any kid’s childhood fears of the monsters under the bed. If the whole story were told from his point of view, I might have stuck with it the whole way, but since he’s only 5, he doesn’t understand the full complexities of his parents’ marriage, so it probably wouldn’t have worked.

I wouldn’t mind renting the Weber mini-series and watching it again to see if I still like it. I haven’t seen it since I started writing and my criteria for what I like are totally different now.

Sunshine Cleaning

sunshine_cleaning Nothing like a good indie film to remind me why I like movies. An outstanding cast, an original premise, and a strong script made Sunshine Cleaning, a comedy-drama, well worth the ticket price.

It stars Amy Adams (who I loved as the charismatic Princess Giselle in Enchanted) and Emily Blunt (who had a major role in The Devil Wears Prada) as sisters who’ve fallen on hard times. Rose (Adams) is a single mother of a young boy who gets kicked out of school after school. Oscar (played by Jason Spevack who I recognized as the young Jimmy Fallon character in Fever Pitch) isn’t a bad kid, but he just gets bored and causes trouble. Rose wants to put Oscar in private school, but doesn’t make enough money as a maid to afford it. Meanwhile, Norah (Blunt) loses her job. A timely job opportunity presents itself through Norah’s lover (played by the cleanest-cut Steve Zahn I’ve ever seen). During one of their clandestine hotel stays he mentions that crime scene cleaners make a lot of money cleaning up the mess after murders and suicides. Rose and Norah join forces and start Sunshine Cleaning.

There are a few spoilers to follow, this is a movie that’s a little bit difficult to review without revealing a few things. 🙂

With a lot of help from their father (Alan Arkin) and Winston, the softspoken one-armed owner of a cleaning supply store, they become professionals, learn about each other and about themselves (it sounds corny but it’s true). They’re surprised to find that they actually like the business. Every house they go to is different, yet the same. Different in the particulars, but each family has gone through a tragic death and they feel good that they can help in even such a small way.

Norah tracks down the daughter of a suicide they’d cleaned up after, befriending her and finally coming to terms with the death of her own mother as a child. Amy Adams develops the beginnings of a romantic relationship with Winston.

I like to see movies that didn’t come straight from a Hollywood mold, and this is one of those. A one-armed love interest, the lead females scrubbing blood off walls with toothbrushes, and a CB radio that connects to heaven. There’s a lot to love in this movie, and it would be worth paying to see it again (the true sign of a good movie).

What is “literary”?

My question for today’s post is: What is “literary fiction”? Taken literally, the answer seems pretty straightforward. “literary” seems to be related to “literature”. “Literature” means “written”. So “literary fiction” simply means written fiction, right? Wrong!

I’ve yet to find a widely accepted definition of “literary” as a genre. Glimmer Train classifies themselves as literary, as does Zoetrope (and many others). Whether you like the stories in these magazines is, as with all magazines, a matter of taste.

But to me classifying some writing as “literary” to the exclusion of other writing implies a sort of elitist attitude, as though “literary” writing is the only sort of writing that has value. The same for labeling a section in the bookstore as “literature”, as opposed to other fiction sections like mystery, horror, science fiction/fantasy. I don’t object to the section–I’ve read many books in the literature section that I enjoyed, but I do object to the title. The book store might as well label it “high-quality fiction” and “other”. As I’m primarily a reader of speculative fiction, this bothers me.

And a lot of times, the boundary is fuzzy anyway. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire, is in the literature section, despite it being clearly fantasy material. Why is that classed as literature? I suspect its the tone and style of writing, which would explain why this is the only Oz story I don’t care for.

Classic science fiction and fantasy is generally classified as literature also–I believe I’ve seen The Time Machine, A Clockwork Orange, 1984, and other classics in there. Is Speculative fiction like a fine wine, somehow gaining quality as it ages? If we’d been alive to taste of The Time Machine shortly after it was written, would it have ruined the experience because it wasn’t old enough? Maybe if I take a George R. R. Martin novel and put it in the book cellar, and pull it out again in several generations, it will have become literature, perfectly aged and fetching a handsome price from literature connoisseurs who will riffle the pages, sniff the binding, and read only a paragraph at a time so as not to be overwhelmed by the power of the prose between the covers.

City of Green

When I read L. Frank Baum’s original The Wizard of Oz, his description of the Emerald City got me thinking. In that version of the Wizard of Oz, there was a city law mandating that all people entering the city must have sunglasses attached to their head. The shades literally locked over your ears (though they seemed to not notice the fact that the tin man and scarecrow don’t really have ears). The stated reason they gave for this was that the emerald city was so dazzling that you needed to wear the sunglasses or you would be blinded. Inside the city, everything was green, green buildings, green clothes, green horses, green-skinned people, everything. They even get Dorothy a green dress. Well, they have their audience with the Wizard and everything, and then leave the city, having the shades removed at the gate and Dorothy is surprised to find out that her dress has changed to white. Later they find out that the shades weren’t just shades, they were tinted green! The city wasn’t really as green as it claimed to be, but everyone thought it was because they were wearing green sunglasses! Now, there’s some inherent flaws in this whole plotline, such as the fact that they didn’t notice that each other turned green as well.

Anyway, imagine a race that grew up in such a world, where they were forced to wear green shades all the time. It’s sort of a specialized way of being color blind. It’s still monochrome, but instead of seeing in shades of gray, it’s shades of green.

But the most interesting thing would be the question of what happens when you take an adult, who’s lived their life in a green world, out of that world and let them see the full spectrum. The first question, and an interesting one, is whether they would be able to see the other colors at all. I took a psychology class in college, and one of the random tidbits I remember from it is that vision isn’t inherently built into our systems. It is learned through experience. They explained one experiment in which they put polarized glasses on a kitten and kept them on it for the first couple months of its life (probably not ethical these days, but the results are interesting nonetheless). When they finally took the glasses off, the kitten couldn’t see light that was polarized in the other direction! It had never seen that kind of light so its brain never learned to process it. I don’t recall if the cat developed the full optical abilities later in its life, but I think animals have to learn pretty early.

So along these same lines, would people who grew up in the Emerald City be able to see other colors at all? I don’t think they would. What would they see instead? Would they see everything, but shifted into the greenscale? Would non-green things be essentially invisible to them, hiding in giant blindspots? I’m curious.

Let’s assume that they’re physiologically and mentally capable of processing the full range of colors. Can you imagine what a wondrous time it would be, just taking them for a walk, showing them multicolored flowers, seeing songbirds, or even a rainbow? It would be like a drug! They would never want to go back to the Emerald City again! And if they did, and they told their friends about colors, their friends would laugh and think them crazy!

Would a monochrome society develop any differently than a full-color society? At least some areas would. Art would be viewed very differently. Florists would probably have much less demand. Marketing people would have to rely on other tactics rather than color of packaging. I’m sure there are many other ways. Can you think of any others?

Would people as individuals develop any differently?

Now, this idea was covered in some extent by the movie Pleasantville, but in a rather different way. In that movie, the main characters enter a classic 50s TV show, which is of course in black and white, and are stuck there for a while. But that is really a different thing. That society didn’t develop that way, it was an artificial construct by entertainment censoring standards in the 50s, as well as the lack of the development of color TV technology at the time. It wasn’t forced on them by their government, it was just how the artificial world was fabricated. Along with the lack of color were other oddities, such as no one being aware of sex, or toilets, or reading, and firemen that didn’t do anything but rescue kitties from trees. When color started bleeding into the world, it represented a loss of innocence, which some people thought was a good thing and others thought was a bad thing. It’s a great movie, but again, it’s usage of color is rather different than the Emerald Citizen concept. Emerald Citizens are otherwise normal people, knowing of copulation and defacation and firefighting.

In The Matrix, there’s at least one mention of Oz–not surprising of course with the parallel world analogy. But another parallel that might not be so obvious is that the cities inside the matrix tend to all be tinted green, as though seen through a green filter, just like the Emerald City. And in both cases, the populace is largely controlled by an uncaring dictator who controls them by misleading them.

Also, a friend pointed out an interesting side effect that might be visible to Emerald Citizens when they first see the outside world, assuming they are physiologically capable of seeing other colors. When you look at one color or image too long, then when you close your eyes or look away you often see an afterimage, everything still in the same place but with all the colors inverted to their negative–black becomes white, green becomes red, etc… So these people might see everything in tints of red for a while until their eyes cope and adjust.

On a related side-story, I took a car trip with my older brother a decade or so ago. I wasn’t old enough to drive yet, so he did all the driving, and I tended to be lulled to sleep by the sound of the engine. On more than one occasion I woke up to find the whole world was tinted green! The effect faded after a few seconds or a minute, and then everything was normal again. It was bizarre! I recently found out that it was probably just another afterimage. I must have been sleeping in direct sunlight so that the sun glowed red through my eyelids. After hours of red exposure, I woke up, and opened my eyes, and everything was tinted green–the negative of the red filter provided by my eyelids. Crazy stuff. 🙂

Glimmer Train Winter 2009 & Zoetrope All-Story Winter 2008/2009

glimmer_train zoetrope Reading these two magazines was an attempt to broaden my horizons and learn more about so-called “literary” publications. I put literary in quotes because I don’t care for that label at all. Isn’t all writing literary? To me, it’s like labelling a section in the book store “The Good Stuff”, leaving the obvious assumption that everything else in the bookstore is not good. But that’s a topic of its own that I’ll cover another day.

Anyway, these two magazines label themselves as literary, making me question whether I ever want to submit to a literary publication. I don’t think my stories could fit in, if these two copies are the norm.

Among other things, each of these magazines cost me 9 dollars. Even the more expensive speculative novels don’t cost that much, and the expensive ones of those are often 800 pages! It’s worth it for a little market research, but I can’t imagine paying that regularly for a magazine.

Does anyone have any literary publications that they think are particularly good examples? I would love to read one that would make me want to buy a second copy. I welcome any input–if you suggest one that I can find a copy of, I’ll try to give it a read. I don’t want to make blanket statements about literary magazines without a well-rounded sample.

In these two issues, I only enjoyed one story, but it was the one published back in 1921, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”. No doubt it was included more as part of a cross-marketing campaign, but I’m glad I read it. It’s rather dry, and doesn’t get very close into any of the character’s heads, but that was more of the style of the time, so I’m not going to criticize reading/writing tastes of a long-gone decade. I can tell even just from seeing the previews that they changed quite a bit from the stort-story, which is fine. The short story is a neat idea, but not nearly fleshed-out enough to want to spend two hours with. I’d been wanting to see the movie, so it’s raised my interest level.

The rest of the stories were pretty much all the same as each other, so I won’t list them off. It was clear that many of the writers have a whole lot of talent, I’m not disputing that. There were some great turns of phrases and some interesting moments that let the talent shine through, but I think they could write better: the talent’s there but they’re holding themselves back.

I tried to read these with an open mind, I really did. I’ll always be, first and foremost, a speculative fiction fan. Like so many things, this is just a matter of taste. I’ve like many non-speculative books and stories, but nothing quite hits that “sense-of-wonder” button like a good science fiction or fantasy. I didn’t try to compare these literary stories to speculative stories as that wouldn’t have been fair. I wanted to decide if I would just enjoy them on their own, not compare them to some other ideal. I really didn’t care for them, and while trying to examine why, I made a short list of things that seemed to be in common between many or all of these stories:

1. No cohesive theme. After I read something, I like to have a feel for the theme. That doesn’t mean it has to be spelled out with an explicit moral, like the ending of a fable, but I like to have a feel for what it was trying to say. Either these stories were trying to give it no theme or too many themes. Too many themes is just as bad as no theme, as each one is diluted by the presence of too many others. Perhaps they all had the theme “Life sucks”. That’s possible, but I don’t really care to read them in that case. I can get enough “Life sucks” themes by watching the news.

2. No plot, no climax, just a series of small things happening after another. Like ripping a page from someone’s journal at random. You see some of that person’s day-to-day struggles, but you’re told that these struggles have been that way for a long time, and nothing in the story hints that they will be any different in the days to come.

3. No attempt to get close into the protagonist’s point of view. My favorite stories are the ones that allow you to get into the protagonist’s head. This is why prose has the potential to be so much better in its way than cinema. Cinema allows you to see what happens, but well-written prose allows you to experience it. Instead of being told what happens by a seemingly impartial (and boring) narrator, the narration can be a lens through which you can see through the eye of the protagonist. There was none of that here. Each story told me what happened in that person’s life, without really letting me get into their head. Perhaps that’s the preferred way in “Life sucks” stories to avoid causing depression in yourself.
This somewhat relates to a previous blog post of mine, about cinematic descriptions:
http://steffenwolf.blogspot.com/2009/03/cinematic-descriptions.html

4. almost all are in 1st person. I’ve heard many editors complain about first person stories, how writers should generally stick to 3rd person. I’d never understood, but I think now I’m beginning to. I felt like first person was used to counteract the #3 on my list, getting close into the protagonist’s point of view. Rather than going through the difficult labor of making me see through the protagonist’s eyes, just use first person narration instead. After all, what’s closer into the person’s head than first person? The trouble is when first person is used as a substitute for #3. In one case, a woman is talking to her friend and the friend suspects her husband is cheating on her. She’s right, and it’s the narrating woman who is the other woman, but we don’t find that out until halfway through the story! When the protagonist withholds information from me that’s not mysterious, it’s annoying and distancing.

5. The opening sentence and paragraph have nothing to do with the rest. I like opening sentences best when they are like a topic sentence of the story–they tell what the stories about without giving too much away. For example, in the cheating story mentioned in #4, the story starts out by saying they got an unusual September snow, then spends the whole first paragraph telling about. The story has nothing to do with weather in general or snow in particular, so when the topic suddenly switched to cheating husbands in the 2nd paragraph it was annoying and disorienting. Did they stick that first paragraph on by mistake? If it had nothing to do with the story you could paste it onto the beginning of ANY story and it would make the same amount of sense.

6. no real ending or beginning. Most of the stories didn’t really have a beginning nor really have an ending. The stories began when the words started, and ended when the words stopped. Typically, the real story begins when something changes in the person’s life, and ends at some kind of resolution, whether it be death, or change of character, or the resolution of the actual conflict. Not so in these stories.

7. The stories all had a tone and them of “Woe is me ain’t my life terrible”. It’s easy enough to find these stories on the news, do I really need to seek out fiction that does the same thing? And I really hope the proportion of protagonists who hate their lives isn’t proportional to real people who hate their lives, else we are all in a lot of trouble!

8. Not in every story, but maybe 1/4 to 1/2, pedophilia is an element, whether it’s explicit sex or just creepy looks from teenagers’ dads. Maybe I’m just naive, but I like to think that it doesn’t happen to everybody as often as these stories would have me believe.