writing style – Fireflies & Laserbeams

Ants in the Pants Syndrome

Thursday January 31, 2013 | By Hieronymus Hawkes | Uncategorized | Leave Comments

http://www.flickr.com/photos/drewleavy/509975348/

Are any of you what I call kinetic writers? I find that I have trouble sitting still for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a stretch, then as soon as I finish a particular passage I have to get up and walk around. I’ll go down the hall and use the bathroom or look out the window for a minute or just get up and walk around the room for a minute before I sit back down and jump back into the writing. I haven’t figured out yet whether this is slowing me down or helping the neurons to fire. Obviously, there is time lost in all this moving about, but it’s like sitting and writing builds up a static charge and I have to get up and release it. I don’t have a choice. The charge builds faster if I am doing a more intense part of the story, like somehow the prose are loaded with their own electrical potential and it courses back through the keyboard and into my body as the words flow out...conservation of energy or something. It causes me to have to get up more frequently when the story is really hopping or getting more spirited. The Ants-in-the-Pants syndrome. It’s a good sign for me though, that I am doing impassioned work. Something is clicking in the story and I am on a roll, so I really don’t mind, and the interruption is brief, just a quick burst of energy blown off, like letting your gun barrel cool off after firing several magazine loads. I don’t know any other way, if I am in a place where I can’t get up frequently the charge builds up and creates a buffer of sorts that slows down the words coming out. I have to stop and do something else for a few minutes until the buffer clears. I’m envious of you people than can sit and churn out a thousand words an hour. Maybe someday I’ll get where I can do that regularly. But I don’t type that well to start with and I have the attention span of a gnat. I’ve hit that baseline a few times, but it’s probably more common to do half that amount. I’ve also gotten in the practice of writing down ideas and even leaving verbal notes to myself on my iPhone, because I know I’ll forget otherwise and my colander-like brain will drop that nugget of info right out and no matter how hard I try I won’t be able to dredge it up from the recesses of the trash compactor in my head. In the meantime, I’ll just get a little extra exercise every quarter hour I reckon, and keep churning out words like a turtle after a caterpillar. Clear Ether!

Sunday April 15, 2012 | By Hieronymus Hawkes | Novel Review | Leave Comments

This is not really intended to be a book review, but more the impact the book is having on me as a writer. I’m reading a book by Hannu Rajaniemi called The Quantum Thief. It’s his first novel and I have to say that I’m extremely impressed. He runs a think-tank in Scotland and has a PhD in String Theory -- big brain on this guy. The stuff in his novel is an absolutely fantastic extrapolation of social media and the internet into the far future and it’s stunning. I read an editorial piece yesterday by Bruce Sterling (Beyond the Beyond) in the newest issue of ARC talking about Futurists and the art of predicting and how it’s not realistic to expect anyone to get it right, but sometimes the story tellers hit on the right chord. I think Mr. Rajaniemi is not just striking the right chord, but making a symphony. BTW, he also has a short story in the same edition of ARC.

I’ll be honest; I had a really hard time getting through the first chapter. It is full of imagery and language that’s alien to a present-day human being, even one that is relatively tech savvy and speaks most of the jargon of current SciFi. It took me several read throughs to wrap my head around some of his constructs, but once I was acclimated the ride really took off. The story centers on several characters and they are all rich and well-developed and interesting. The landscape switches regularly from Mars to deep space and elsewhere, and the underlying science is well conceived, if poorly described, and I am barely hanging on by the tips of my fingers trying to keep up with it. It touches on the ramifications of immortality or the illusion of immortality and what is really real. The underpinning story is fantastical, but merely lays bedrock to present a smorgasbord of amazing concepts. Someone needs something stolen and they need the best thief that has ever lived to pull it off, it’s just that he is not quite himself …yet.

One of the reviews I read put it succinctly, “It is flamboyantly intelligent, wildly intricate and clearly imaginative in ten thousand ways that I will never fully be able to appreciate.” Bang on. At some point I gave up worrying if I was ever going to completely understand the various devices he uses and just went with the flow and enjoyed the scenery, even though at times I didn’t understand what I was looking at. The thing that really strikes me is how jealous I am. I am so pedestrian in my plotting and use of language by comparison that I’m almost ashamed of my story. Granted, they are in completely different vanes, but the ideas and richness of the tapestry he’s woven are so far beyond anything I’ve been able to imagine it’s just enthralling, the way watching a train wreck is enthralling. You can’t turn your head away. I’m not saying his story is a train wreck. I’m saying that me reading it feels like I’m on the train and I will never be as good as he is at this writing thing. It’s a thing that will be forever just out of my grasp, even though I can see it clearly for how lovely it is.

I have a decent vocabulary, but I don’t want to speak down to people, and I don’t want to even give the impression that I think I know more than you do. When I was a younger man I spoke differently than my peers and they made fun. I figured out pretty quickly that it wasn’t necessary, and in fact was counter-productive, to show off the new words I learned. I’m wondering if that has influenced my thought patterns to the point that I am making myself dumber somehow.

I don’t feel like I am on the same plane of existence as some of these brilliant minds. It makes me sad, not sad like someone died, but more for the loss of something I never had. I really want deep down in my soul to be a brilliant science fiction writer, but I also know that my colander brain can barely hold a thought. It’s more like I get glimpses of the fragments as they fall through the cracks and I have to piece the puzzle together. I still end up with a few pieces missing and have to do my best with what’s left over. It’s extremely difficult to conceive of things that are new and breathtaking, but my mind does seem to be proficient at recognizing it when it sees it, when other people do it.

Getting back to the story, there are some flaws in his writing style. Flaws seems like too harsh a word, but for me, assuming I could come up with the ideas he has, the writing is a little too distant and even though his concepts are outlandish and almost incomprehensible, I would have tried a little harder to make them easier for the everyman to understand. Would that have diminished them somehow? I’m undecided, but I do know it was a struggle to get through this book in spots, and I’ve learned that things that slow down the reader, not the story, but the reader, are bad juju. I’ve read critiques that lambast some of the great conceptualists as weak when it comes to the mechanics of proper story engineering. The truly great ones manage to do both. The jury is still out for me if Mr. Rajaniemi is going to fall into that category, but it is a damn fine debut novel. Even being considered as a great debut puts him in fine company, company most aspiring authors would love to be in. It has inspired me to try even harder to get my stories right. I have a far, far future story in the works and it is obvious I have left a lot of stones unturned.

Clear Ether!