fiction_theory

Creatively speaking, that is.

Not surprisingly, when people ask me about my creative process, it's mostly about writing. But occasionally I get similar questions about photography. The writers want to know about my inspiration or ideas; photographers and other artists want to know why I take certain pictures, or the angles, or framing, or whatever else.

This is a question I've been trying to answer for a long time myself. More than a decade ago my friend Walt Stoneburner / whiskeyrivers was starting to get interested in photography and asked me all of the above. It started with him looking at a sidelong shot I'd just taken of the Washington Monument while we walked through D.C., and he asked "Why did you take it from there?"

I struggled to answer because I wasn't really sure. At the time the best I could come up with was, "Because that's the way I saw it". Not a traditional straight-on angle, but something a little different that piqued my interest.

I wish I could tell you that I've got it all figured out now, but I really haven't. Looking at the picture now I can understand that I liked the look of the sky, the lighting, the shading on the monument, the perspective from an angle that "divided" the monument in two. But that's all technical stuff, really. If you asked me right now why I decided to snap the shot at that particular instant and no other, I'd still finally have to say, "Because that's the way I saw it."

Never mind a discussion about aesthetics; it felt right. But what does that even mean?

I've been thinking about this again lately since just had a bit of insight from my unwitting friend and fantastic artist Miranda Banks. She went to the Grand Canyon within two weeks of my visit there last summer, and after coming home painted a large and spectacular panorama of the South Rim. Never mind that I'd just been there myself and taken a couple dozen photos or more from different angles; her painting made me look at the Canyon again in a way I hadn't really seen it before. Which I suppose is one thing art is supposed to do. (And writing, for all that.)

Then this week Miranda posted on Facebook that she was doing a particular series of artworks that she hoped would show a place of her childhood the way she had seen it. Without thinking--and maybe specifically because I wasn't thinking too hard about it--I replied that this was exactly what I wanted to do with my photographs. I wanted people to see the things I cared about the way I saw them.

And I keep coming back to those places and people. For instance, my favorite spot on Earth is one-mile stretch of the Roanoke River where it crosses the Blue Ridge Parkway. I've been going there since 1985; if I've taken less than one hundred pictures of any single spot I'd be surprised. Like this...



...a shot I've taken hundreds of times. But from slightly different angles, or times of day, or seasons, or weather, or what have you. It's a place with as many moods as a human being, and I like capturing and displaying all of them.

Especially if, say, someone like my nephew Jacob happens to be there too...



...which leads to whole new layers I want to capture and explore and preserve. This is simply one of my favorite ways of preserving a moment and what that particular moment meant to me at the time I took the picture. And then to see what it means to the person looking at the picture.

And really, my writing works the same way. I write things the way I see them. I write things that I want to be preserved and displayed. I write something the way I want you to see it. And eventually I'll want to know what it means to the reader.

Looking over this again, I think I'm making it sound a lot more intentional and calculated than it really is. There's some of both behind my photos and writing, of course; to a degree there always has to be. There certainly is when I choose what to send to an editor or post online. But mostly, at the time of creation, I just happened to like the light and shade of that specific footstep.

If you set a story in a Celtic Otherworld which is co-located with London, your otherworldly Celts are not all that likely to speak Irish; a lost eastern dialect of Welsh is more probable.

If you set a story in 1666, and your viewpoint character does not have access to time-travel, he probably would not be familiar with the concepts of telegraphing, or oxygen.

Just saying, like.

Laurie to me: "Your anti-conscience is a rat bastard".

It's been a while since I've done a bookish update, so thought I'd fill you in.

In a less than a week, I'll tell you about the short story just finished for the Ministry Initiative. As part of the blog hop to promote the Kickstarter, I'm giving away some steampunky goodness. Keep your eyes peeled!

Also, I am working on a novella set in the Unnaturalists universe, which should be available in e-edition only sometime this fall. No title yet, but it involves a certain Mr. Waddingly, for those of you who may wonder more about the nefarious Charles. ;-)

Lastly, you'll see me in Casper, WY this September for the Equality State Book Festival. More on that to come!

Somewhere around 1994 I did some research for my PhD in the archives of the Plunkett Foundation near Oxford, as its founder - Sir Horace Plunkett - was quite important to my topic. In the end I found his own diary of rather little use, but I did come across this excellent letter about him from George Bernard Shaw, written to Margaret Digby (who Shaw assumed was male) in 1948, sixteen years after Plunkett's death, when Shaw was 92 but clearly still with it.

            16th June 1948

Dear Mr [sic] Digby,
      By all means quote as much as you please of my correspondence with H[orace] P[lunkett]. There were more interesting letters than the one you copied for me; but he may not have kept them.
      I do not envy you your job. Plunkett was a puzzle. He devoted his life to the service of his fellow creatures collectively; and personally he disliked them all. He kept open house in Foxrock for all visitors of any note, rich or poor, to Ireland; and he hated all his guests. He remained a bachelor for the sake of Lady Fingal[l], and was unquestionably in love with her; yet I never felt convinced that he quite liked her. He took the chair as a matter of course at all meetings in which he was interested. I have, perhaps, more experience of public meetings than most people; and I can testify that he ranked first among the very worst chairmen on earth. He went round the Congested Districts to persuade Irish farmers whose farms were uneconomic to move into better holdings: a task which would have taxed the persuasive powers of a barrister earning £20,000 a year, and took with him small schoolmasters of the £150 type, who could only make Plunkett's offer in the baldest terms, and when it was refused say no more than "Well, you are a very foolish man". Except within his own class he was a bad mixer.
      And yet with all this against him he was an amiable man whom nobody could dislike, a highly talented writer with a sense of humor [sic], great political intelligence, and tireless public spirit, the greatest political Irishman of his time.
      I liked him thoroughly and always stayed at Foxrock when I went to Ireland even after I found out that his hatred of his guests probably included me.
      I repeat, you will find it hard to do justice to a man of such high virtues hampered by so many trivial contradictions.
                        G.Bernard Shaw

I've linked to a few explanatory articles and pictures. The original letter is here and here.

1. If you've enjoyed hp_beholder in this or previous years, you may want to check out beholder_plus, a community set up by the lovely magnetic_pole to discuss the themes, characters and anything else relating to the fest (or, as magnetic_pole puts it, "the challenges and joys of writing unconventionally attractive characters in general").

2. Quite a few people on my friends list wrote for the fest, so I enjoyed trying to guess who was responsible for each story. I have my suspicions about several of you, although I won't voice them unless asked! I'm also curious to know whether anyone thinks they've figured out which story was mine, so feel free to leave your guesses in the comments, if you like. Comments are screened, and I won't be confirming or denying any guesses until reveals happen next week. :)

This entry was originally posted at http://lyras.dreamwidth.org/75029.html. You can comment there using Open ID.

Just a couple more recs, as the fest has now wrapped up for the year.

First up: Come Back to Haunt You, Moaning Myrtle/Minerva McGonagall, background Minerva McGonagall/Amelia Bones, 4000 words, rated Teen. Summary: Nothing about love makes sense.

There have been a few Myrtle stories this year, and all of them have succeeded, I think, in making her something more than her canon caricature. This one takes its starting point from the fact that Myrtle and Minerva must have been near-contemporaneous (is that a word?) at Hogwarts, at least if you subscribe to the original backstory/assumptions about Minerva's age. It's a sweet, moving and occasionally funny look at second chances with two characters who have known each other for sixty years.

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Next up is The Aftermath, Charity/Hermione, Dudley/Neville, Pomona/Minerva, 3770 words, PG-13. Summary: In the days after the Battle for Hogwarts, there was much healing work to be done. Fortunately all of creation was helping.

This is a beautiful story of healing. I know there are some (very unusual) pairings in there, but for me the story almost reads as gen, because it isn't about any one couple getting together; it's about how the whole of Hogwarts regroups after the Battle of Hogwarts, looking for (and finding) hope for the future. I love the way the author blends the constant presence of magic with the sense of love that permeates all the characters and settings, making for a truly beautiful, moving story.

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And some art to finish: Frog, Paper, Scissors, Marietta/Millicent, Draco/Viktor, NC-17. This is a gorgeously playful, happy piece that's also very pretty.


In my recs, I've linked to the stories and artworks that appealed most to me personally; if none of these take your fancy, you could do worse than check out the masterlist (anonymous for now), which offers a huge variety of pairings, genres and story lengths for every taste.

This entry was originally posted at http://lyras.dreamwidth.org/74989.html. You can comment there using Open ID.

I don’t remember the name of the author but a few years ago I read a science fiction book in which human explorers of a distant planet uncover evidence of an advanced alien civilisation, but it is a civilisation that has long vanished. The book was a fascinating combination of science fiction and archaeology.

It is of course quite plausible that if we ever did reach planets in distant solar systems we might find that any civilisation that had existed there would have long since disappeared in the mists of time.

What other science fiction novels deal with the idea that our first contact with an alien civilisation might come too late, and that we find nothing but ruins?