The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists. But there are plenty of men, I believe, who find themselves unable to resolve the difficulty in any such cavalier manner men whose chief burden and distinction, in fact, is that they do not employ formulae in their thinking, but are thrown constantly upon industry, ingenuity and the favor of God. Among such men there remains a good deal more belief in what is vaguely called inspiration. They know by hard experience that there are days when their ideas flow freely and clearly, and days when they are dammed up damnably. Say a man of that sort has a good day. For some reason quite incomprehensible to him all his mental processes take on an amazing ease and slickness. Almost without conscious effort he solves technical problems that have badgered him for weeks. He is full of novel expedients, extraordinary efficiencies, strange cunnings. He has a feeling that he has suddenly and unaccountably broken through a wall, dispersed a fog, got himself out of the dark. So he does a double or triple stint of the best work that he is capable of maybe of far better work than he has ever been capable of before and goes to bed impatient for the morrow. And on the morrow he discovers to his consternation that he has become almost idiotic, and quite incapable of any work at all.
I challenge any man who trades in ideas to deny that he has this experience. The truth is that he has it constantly. It overtakes poets and contrapuntists, critics and dramatists, philosophers and journalists; it may even be shared, so far as I know, by advertisement writers, chautauqua orators and the rev. clergy. The characters that all anatomists of melancholy mark in it are the irregular ebb and flow of the tides, and the impossibility of getting them under any sort of rational control. The brain, as it were, stands to one side and watches itself pitching and tossing, full of agony but essentially helpless. Here the man of creative imagination pays a ghastly price for all his superiorities and immunities; nature takes revenge upon him for dreaming of improvements in the scheme of things. Sitting there in his lonely room, gnawing the handle of his pen, racked by his infernal quest, horribly bedevilled by incessant flashes of itching, toothache, eye-strain and evil conscience thus tortured, he makes atonement for his crime of being intelligent. The normal man, the healthy and honest man, the good citizen and householder this man, I daresay, knows nothing of all that travail. It is reserved especially for artists and metaphysicians. It is the particular penalty of those who pursue strange butterflies into dark forests, and go fishing in enchanted and forbidden streams.
H.L. Mencken, “The Divine Afflatus”, Prejudices, Second Series, 1920
February 7, 2014
QotD: Writer’s block
January 21, 2014
George Orwell – confessed pamphlet addict
The British Library has posted an interesting short item on their Untold lives blog about George Orwell’s pamphlet collection:
George Orwell’s collection of mostly political ephemera was an important barometer of the social changes of the 1930s and 1940s, and a measure of his influences during those decades. While Orwell’s personal papers went to University College London and the National Archives, his miscellaneous materials are held by the British Library. Totalling over 2700 items, a full inventory of Orwell’s collection of pamphlets is now available via the British Library’s website.
Orwell was not a writer of ‘bestselling’ books until the end of his life, after the Second World War. He became known as a journalist, a critic of other people’s writings and a word-portraitist of the landscape of politics. It is likely he never passed up the opportunity to acquire pamphlets of any persuasion. He wryly observed in The Tribune that the pamphleteer’s road was paved by a “complete disregard for fairness or accuracy” (8 December 1944). Perhaps the most appealing aspect of his pamphlets collection is that he wasn’t Hoovering them up to form a George Orwell Archive; he considered them as a spectrum of thought that was deserving of preserving.
[…]
Orwell’s heaps of pamphlets informed his writing, both fiction and non fiction. He took pride in his squirrelling-away of pamphlets, “political, religious and what-not”. In 1949, he estimated that this hoard numbered 1200-2000, but even the higher figure was an underestimation. He wrote that “a few of them must be great rarities” and they were “bound to be of historical interest in 50 years time.” In line with most of his considerations, he wasn’t wrong.
December 30, 2013
QotD: Yes, but what is it really about?
A very common way of thinking in literary criticism is not seen as a consequence of Communism, but it is. Every writer has the experience of being told that a novel, a story, is “about” something or other. I wrote a story, “The Fifth Child,” which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on.
A journalist from France walked into my living room and before she had even sat down said, “Of course ‘The Fifth Child’ is about AIDS.”
An effective conversation stopper, I assure you. But what is interesting is the habit of mind that has to analyze a literary work like this. If you say, “Had I wanted to write about AIDS or the Palestinian problem I would have written a pamphlet,” you tend to get baffled stares. That a work of the imagination has to be “really” about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary.
The demand that stories must be “about” something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers.
Doris Lessing, “Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer”, New York Times, 1992-06-26 (reprinted 2007-10-13)
December 23, 2013
Ambrose Bierce, remembered
In The Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson recounts the life and (theories about the) death of Ambrose Bierce:
“We have produced but one genuine wit,” H. L. Mencken wrote, in a survey of American letters: “Ambrose Bierce. And save to a small circle he is unknown today.” Mencken was writing decades after Bierce had gone off to Mexico, by which time his life was best remembered for the way he had left it. And the circle of those who read him is even smaller now, needless to say. When the Library of America finally got around to issuing a canonical selection of his writing, in 2011, the single volume (Philip Roth got nine!) was relatively slender; it was the 219th in the library’s series of great American writers.
His fame was not general, even at its most robust. Those who admired him, mostly his fellow writers, admired him extravagantly. He was a “writer’s writer,” in the deadly phrase. The tributes from William Gladstone, Arnold Bennett, Bret Harte, and many other popular and learned literary men shared a common thread: Why, they all asked, wasn’t Bierce better known? Bierce himself ached for fame as awfully as any writer, but was, in time, amused by the strange status he had achieved: He was famous for not being famous. He wrote to a friend toward the end of his life:
How many times, and during a period of how many years must one’s unexplainable obscurity be pointed out to constitute fame? Not knowing, I am almost disposed to consider myself the most famous of authors. I have pretty nearly ceased to be “discovered,” but my notoriety as an obscurian may be said to be worldwide and everlasting.
The problem with “writers’ writers” — as many readers have discovered — is that they are seldom “readers’ writers.” It depends on the readers as much as the writers, of course, and today’s readers might find they have caught up to Bierce’s jaded view of war, politics, romantic love, religion, family life, and nearly everything else. When he is remembered these days it is usually for the short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which, until recently, was one of a handful of short stories — along with “The Lottery,” “The Most Dangerous Game,” “To Build a Fire,” and a few others — that no student could escape an American high school without having pretended to read.
His witticisms, which were of a very high order, reappear sometimes, too. His best aphorisms in The Devil’s Dictionary are easily a match for La Rochefoucauld, maybe even Voltaire. His most reprinted book review consists of a single sentence: “The covers of this book are too far apart.” When a young mother pestered him for advice on bringing up children, he finally replied: “Study Herod, madam. Study Herod.” Democracy he defined as “four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.” At the death of a local politician, Bierce volunteered the epitaph: “Here lies Frank Pixley, as usual.” Disdainful of philosophical pretension, he rewrote Descartes’s axiom as “Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum”: “I think I think, therefore I think I am.”
H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.
November 22, 2013
Funding the Arthur C. Clarke award
Charles Stross has just posted a link to a recent short story of his (from 2011) which was written as part of a fund-raiser to help keep the Arthur C. Clarke awards going and an explanation of why most short stories can be improved by adding dinosaurs and sodomy:
Now, I don’t write many short stories these days, but I’m a sucker for the right kind of charity approach. And besides, I had a hypothesis I wanted to test: that every short story can be improved by adding dinosaurs and sodomy.
No, seriously: click that link, it’s work-safe but side-splittingly funny if you’ve ever been to a writers’ workshop. And probably utterly incomprehensible if you haven’t, so I shall have to unpack it for you …
In Michael Swanwick’s oeuvre — and he’s one of the most perspicacious, indeed brilliant, exponents of the short story form in SF today — dinosaurs are a short-hand signifier for action, adventure, thrills, and chases: whereas sodomy is a placeholder representing introspection into the human condition, sensitivity to emotional nuance, and a great big bottle of lube.
So when he’s telling students they need to add dinosaurs to their work, he’s eliptically hinting that sensitive emotional nuance needs to be balanced by a bit of GRAAAH!! BITE!!! CHASE!!!!1!!!ELEVENTY (sorry, I got a bit carried away there). And when he tells them to add sodomy, he’s hinting that there may be too much focus on the performance stats of the space super-dreadnought and not quite enough insight into the emotional trauma the steel-jawed captain is grappling with from her seat on the bridge.
Yeah, right. But what happens if you take the advice literally? After all, SF is the genre of the literal space ship, eschewing ironic metaphor in favour of naive wonder at the immanent apprehension of the unreal.
So I was thinking about dinosaurs, and Sodomy, and the challenge of writing a story in the style of Arthur C. Clarke that applied Swanwick’s principles in a deliberately naive and unmetaphorical manner, when I saw this video (which is definitely not safe for work, unless you’re me — you have been warned).
October 23, 2013
QotD: Popular fiction
[…] it’s almost as if there’s a demon whose special job is maintaining the inverse relationship between quality and sales when it comes to runaway bestsellers. E.L. James would be an example, surely, but her prose isn’t much worse than Stephenie Meyer’s, which is middlin’ horrid, while their joint plotting is pretty much entirely horrid, not to mention largely incoherent and ethically vacuous.
Or there’s Dan Brown, who wouldn’t recognise a grammatical sentence or a plausible sequence of events if they each wrestled him to the ground and sat on his head. Which I dearly wish they would, if only to keep him away from any keyboard whatsoever and preserve a forest or two from dying all in vain.
By any criterion other than sales each of these bestsellers is plainly a badly inferior example of its genre and of the writer’s craft, yet they explode while far better things that are no less available (though often less advertised) do modestly. Some of it is a bit like talentless boy bands, an almost purely commercial phenomenon, but one still has to wonder why those particular publishers’ pushes go so viral. And weep.
John Lennard, MA DPhil. (Oxon.), MA (WU) (Goodreads blog), posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold Mailing list (http://lists.herald.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lois-bujold), 2013-10-22
October 13, 2013
Stross – Microsoft Word delenda est
As a writer, Charles Stross hates, hates, hates, hates, hates Microsoft Word and wants it to DIE:
Microsoft Word is a tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer’s use. Worse: it is a near-monopolist, dominating the word processing field. Its pervasive near-monopoly status has brainwashed software developers to such an extent that few can imagine a word processing tool that exists as anything other than as a shallow imitation of the Redmond Behemoth. But what exactly is wrong with it?
I’ve been using word processors and text editors for nearly 30 years. There was an era before Microsoft Word’s dominance when a variety of radically different paradigms for text preparation and formatting competed in an open marketplace of ideas. One early and particularly effective combination was the idea of a text file, containing embedded commands or macros, that could be edited with a programmer’s text editor (such as ed or teco or, later, vi or emacs) and subsequently fed to a variety of tools: offline spelling checkers, grammar checkers, and formatters like scribe, troff, and latex that produced a binary page image that could be downloaded to a printer.
These tools were fast, powerful, elegant, and extremely demanding of the user. As the first 8-bit personal computers appeared (largely consisting of the Apple II and the rival CP/M ecosystem), programmers tried to develop a hybrid tool called a word processor: a screen-oriented editor that hid the complex and hostile printer control commands from the author, replacing them with visible highlight characters on screen and revealing them only when the user told the program to “reveal codes”. Programs like WordStar led the way, until WordPerfect took the market in the early 1980s by adding the ability to edit two or more files at the same time in a split screen view.
October 11, 2013
Alice Munro’s Nobel a vote of confidence for other Canadian dissidents
The Washington Post‘s Max Fisher plays it straight with this report on the recent Nobel Prize awarded to “dissident Canadian writer Alice Munro”:
Munro has long been celebrated by Western writers. American novelist Cynthia Ozick once described her as “our Chekhov,” comparing her to the Russian playwright known for challenging Russia’s restrictive Tsar-era social codes.
State media in Canada reacted positively to the news, calling it a great victory for the Canadian nation and the state ideology. Still, Munro is expected to come under intense pressure from Canadian exile communities, who are already calling on the author to use this moment to focus greater attention on the lack of political freedoms in Canada.
Rights groups such as Amnesty International are urging Ottawa to allow Munro permission to travel abroad to accept the prize in December. Though Canadian Nobel winners have been permitted to fly to Oslo to accept the prize in years past, the political nature of Munro’s work and recent Canadian tensions with the European Union have called this into question.
In the meantime, some of Munro’s admirers in the West have expressed hope that the author’s works may finally be fully translated into English.
September 22, 2013
“By far the worst thing about it is the title”
In the New Statesman, Felix Salmon reviews the latest book by Tim Harford:
Harford […] has a breezy writing style and an infectious sense of humour — but he doesn’t let himself go further than a sober, conservative economist would be comfortable going. He’s trustworthy in a way that most other commentators on economics aren’t. He is not particularly interested in political arguments or in imposing his views on others — instead, he just wants to explain, as simply and clearly as possible, the way in which the economics profession as a whole usually looks at the workings of the world.
Harford, like Levitt, is a microeconomist by training and by avocation; he is most comfortable when faced with questions such as: “Why does a return train ticket on British rail cost only £1 more than a single?” Hence his Undercover Economist franchise: the conceit is that he’s an economist spying on the world, explaining things — and answering readers’ questions — in a way that only an economist would.
With The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, however, Harford has taken a leap out of his microeconomic comfort zone. By far the worst thing about it is the title. There is none of the Undercover Economist about this book, unless you include the dialogue style of writing that Harford has perfected in his FT column. And he’s not striking back at anything at all: no entity was attacking him in the first place. Even the subtitle (How to Run — or Ruin — an Economy) is problematic. No one is going to come away from reading this book convinced that they know how to run an economy.
Instead, what Harford has achieved with his new book is nothing less than the holy grail of popular economics. While retaining the accessible style of popular microeconomics, he has managed to explain, with clarity and good humour, the knottiest and most important problems facing the world’s biggest economies today.
September 7, 2013
QotD: Truth, rumour, and sketchy footnotes
In the Aeneid, Virgil wrote Fama, malum qua non aliud velocius alium, which tranlates as “Rumour, than whom no other evil thing is faster.” Fifteen centuries later, William Shakespeare expounded upon this at great length in Rumor’s prologue to Henry IV, part 2. Two centuries later, Jonathan Swift wrote “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.” A century later C.H. Spurgeon said “Falsehood will fly from Maine to Georgia while truth is pulling her boots on,” but it would appear that he was quoting Fisher Ames, who said the same thing thirty years earlier.
Perhaps unhappy with having lifted the quote directly, in 1859 Spurgeon wrote “A lie will go ’round the world while the truth is pulling its boots on.” Eighty years or so after that, Winston Churchill slowed falsehood a bit, and then vastly improved the quote with a different article of clothing when he said “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
Within four hundred years, however, truth could not find the airlock. In a stroke of irony, the previous pedigree was lost, which means that not only did all copies of The Yale Book of Quotations go missing, but now falsehood spread throughout the galaxy while truth never left the house. Also, somebody deleted this footnote.
Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary, 2012-11-18
August 17, 2013
Molly Crabapple in conversation with Warren Ellis
Any interview introduced with the line “Somewhere, on an NSA server in Utah, there sits an email from Warren Ellis threatening to strangle me to death with my own intestines” has to be worth reading:
You’re semi-crack-addicted to information. Whenever we talk, you have a podcast, the Economist, some ambient drone music, and a reader full of links open. Dead Pig Collector was inspired by an article you read on Chinese garbage disposal. Tell me about your information consumption.
This is going to be just another way for you to insist I listen to the sounds of insects having sex and calling it music while you pollute your apartment with the strains of some idiot with a ukulele wailing about consumption and sodomy.
We call that culture. As an Englishman, you wouldn’t understand.
What would you know about culture? You come from the town that gave the world the cronut.
Cronuts are tasty. As an Englishman, you wouldn’t know what that word means.
We have a joke in this country about American food. It goes like this: “American food.”
I’m sure my information diet isn’t that special. I check the overnight email and RSS feeds in bed, read the Guardian, BBC news, and the Foreign Policy dailies, and scan Twitter over coffee and juice while listening to a couple of podcasts (I subscribe to around fifty podcasts). I have digital subscriptions to the TLS, the LRB, The Economist, National Geographic, and The Wire magazine. I try to read a Kindle Single a week, but I’m getting bad at that. I usually have a few books on the go. I watch Instagram a lot — that service was on the verge of doing some really interesting stuff, and I have a feeling it might die of Facebook disease. You know people are not only running things close to “secret brands” on there, but also selling drugs? I get maybe a dozen email newsletters, maybe less. I live on my phone: I have a bunch of news and informational apps on there.
[…]
What’s the relationship between one’s ethics and their art?
I like to say “none” because you have to be able to wear other people’s ethics in order to write personalities other than your own. But the truth, I suspect, is that your own ethics dictate how that should be done, and for which purpose. It’s probably as indelible as a fingerprint. That actually kind of bothers me. If you can’t subsume yourself into an alien ethos, then you’re being caught writing, as it were, in the same way that actors fear being caught acting. I think it’s probably quite different to painting, in terms of expression of ethics in an artform.
Also, I only threatened to strangle you that one time.
Per hour. As a writer of graphic novels, you’re known for Transmetropolitan, which follows Spider Jerusalem, a gonzo journalist living in the twisted future. At a time when journalism is radically mutating, where do you see as medium going?
Oh, ask the small ones, why don’t you …
I remember Nick Davies saying, after his phone-hacking exposes, that even other investigative journalists at his own newspaper — the independent British newspaper the Guardian — were fighting him on the investigation. Not because they or the Guardian were culpable in any way, but because they were afraid of the boat being rocked. The field’s in a pretty dismal place.
People talk about journalism having been fatally disrupted by the Internet, but, honestly, it was coughing blood long before then. The only potentially good thing about the disruption of journalism is that it’s an ongoing process, and the people who’ve made bank on that disruption today will themselves be disrupted into the ground some time tomorrow.
July 20, 2013
Orwell’s rules of writing
George Orwell wasn’t a perfect writer, but most of us could stand to be able to write more like he did. Here, from his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”, are the rules he recommended to produce clear, understandable writing:
To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one’s meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one’s words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.
However, as Tom Chivers points out, even Orwell could be wrong:
One: never use a figure of speech which “you are used to seeing in print” is a bit weird. For example, you could make the case that “figure of speech” is a figure of speech, since the things it refers to are not literal figures, ie physical shapes or written symbols, but metaphorical ones. And you’ve definitely seen it in print lots and lots. And there’s nothing wrong with it. “Don’t resort to cliché” is what he means, but it’s so obvious it doesn’t need saying.
Two: Language Log nails the “Never us a long word” and the “Never use a foreign phrase” one neatly by pointing out that “when a shorter one will do” or “an everyday English equivalent” are entirely subjective terms. In the very same essay, they point out, Orwell talks of “scrupulous writers”. Could he have said “careful”, Language Log wonders: “Not quite the same meaning, of course. But would it have done?” Similarly, foreign and technical words have subtly different meanings to the English equivalents: there are no true synonyms. “Don’t show off by using needlessly fancy language”, again, is so obvious and unhelpful that it doesn’t need saying; it’s little better than saying “write well”.
Three: “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out” should, by its own rule, be “If it is possible to cut a word, cut it.” Or even “Cut words where possible.” Is that better?
Four: “Never use the passive” is complete nonsense and Orwell uses it regularly himself because there is nothing wrong with it.
Five we’ve dealt with; see two.
Six: So what you’re saying, Mr Orwell, is that applying rigid rules to writing is unhelpful and silly? At last we agree.
All Orwell needs to say is that we should take care over writing, and that cliché and needlessly showy language are worth avoiding. That’s great, if largely empty (“Be better at the things you do” is rarely helpful advice). But the Six Commandments on their tablets of stone are all ridiculous, and if you go through your prose sternly applying them – or worse, if your editor does – then it is very unlikely to make it any better.
July 15, 2013
If you’re bored with the Stratfordians versus Oxfordians, here’s a new debate
In the Guardian, Saul Frampton looks at the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works:
Sometime in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell published Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies — what we now know as the First Folio. It was the literary event of the century, recording for all time the sound of Shakespeare’s English and the sweep of his imagination: Elsinore, Egypt and the Forest of Arden; a balcony, a spotted handkerchief and a skull.
Yet despite this shrine to Shakespeare’s memory, erected by those who knew him, sceptics have continued to doubt his authorship of the plays. He was, they insist, inadequately educated, insufficiently travelled, and didn’t know how to spell his own name. A range of alternative candidates have come and gone over the centuries, including Anne Hathaway, the Jesuits, and more recently Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, the subject of Roland Emmerich’s film Anonymous. As always, conspiracy is more fun than consensus, and the doubters have the internet on their side. Shakespeare has thus become the focus of a global conspiracy industry, joining company with reptilian elites, self-destructing lightbulbs and skeletons on the moon.
Scholars have recently fought back against this scepticism, however. Books such as James Shapiro’s Contested Will and Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells’s Shakespeare Beyond Doubt marshal facts, allusions and funeral monuments to prove that Shakespeare did indeed write the plays and poems attributed to him. Or as Iago says at the end of Othello: “what you know, you know.”
So Shakespeare wrote “Shakespeare”. The printing of the First Folio, however, raises another, ultimately more interesting, question. Without the Folio, Shakespeare’s plays — scattered around in playscripts or in smaller quarto editions — might have been lost to posterity. But did Heminges and Condell edit the text?
H/T to Tim O’Reilly for the link.
June 8, 2013
Charles Stross talks about writing The Jennifer Morgue
If you haven’t yet read any of the “Laundry” books by Charles Stross, you really are missing out on a treat. The Jennifer Morgue was the second in the series and Charles has a blog post up about how the book came to be written:
All stories have several seeds. In the case of “The Jennifer Morgue”, the first seed was the surprising success of “The Atrocity Archives”. The novel my agent initially thought was unsaleable sold to Golden Gryphon, a small but respectable Lovecraftian publisher in the United States. It went gold, going into reprint and becoming their second-best selling title at the time. Then, to everyone’s surprise, the additional novella I wrote for the book (“The Concrete Jungle”) made the shortlist for the Hugo award in 2005. This was a stunning surprise. GG had only sold around 3000 copies of the book; the other novellas on the shortlist had all appeared in magazines or anthologies with four to ten times the number of copies sold! After some hurried email consultation, Gary and Marty at GG agreed to let me put the whole novella on the web, to make it more readily available to the Hugo voters. I don’t know if that’s what did the trick, or if there were additional home-mover effects from the Worldcon in 2005 being held in Glasgow (thus bringing more British voters in than normal) but at the end of August that year I became the dazed and surprised owner of a very shiny trophy.
(And the performance anxiety that had been haunting me for years—”I’m not a real writer, I’m just winging this”—went away for a while.)
But anyway. This success coincided with a French publisher making an offer for translation rights to “The Atrocity Archives”, which in turn got my agent’s attention. She proposed a sequel, and James Bond was so obvious that I don’t think I even considered any alternatives. It would have to be the Movie Bond franchise, for most people these days don’t grow up on the original Ian Fleming novels (the way I did); the humour would come from the incongruity of Bob Howard in James Bond’s shoes. We decided to auction the new book, along with paperback rights to “The Atrocity Archives”, and ended up cutting a deal whereby Golden Gryphon would publish “The Jennifer Morgue” in hardcover while Ace rolled “The Atrocity Archives” in trade paperback, and eventually in mass market. Which then left me pondering what to write … because every Bond movie (or novel) needs a Bond-sized plot device, doesn’t it?
By this time we were into late October 2005. One evening, we were eating a Chinese take-away in front of the TV, watching a documentary on the Discovery Channel about one of the most bizarre CIA projects to happen during the Cold War — Project Azorian (better, but mistakenly, known to the public as “Operation Jennifer”). Seriously, if you don’t know about it, go follow that link right now; it’s about how the CIA enlisted Howard Hughes to help them build a 63,000 ton fake deep-see mining ship, the Glomar Challenger, as cover for a deep-sea grapple that would descend 4,900 metres and raise the hull of a shipwrecked Soviet nuclear missile submarine, the K-129. (Project Azorian was so James Bond that the engineering crew working on the ship were cracking jokes about the bald guy stroking the white cat in his seat on the bridge. How post-modern can you go?)
April 5, 2013
QotD: Warren Ellis explains why he doesn’t get to decide what gets turned into a movie or TV show
FAQ: I don’t get to decide what gets made into a tv series or film. I cannot, I’m afraid, cause people to give me money for things by magic or force of will. Because, let’s face it, if I could, you’d be part of the slave army building my hundred-mile-high golden revolving statue right now.
I’m glad we got that straightened out.
Warren Ellis, “FAQ: I Don’t Get To Decide What Gets Made Into A Movie Or TV Show”, WarrenEllis.com, 2013-04-04
