(Almost) All the Time Writing Tips

I encounter writing tips more often than most, or so I would guess.

Whether it's at the Toronto Writers' Cooperative, on Quora, or on a significant number of the literary blogs I follow, I'm bombarded with writing tips. Some are repeated to the point of being ingrained ("Show, Don't Tell", which I discuss below). Others are accepted by most of the literary community but still have a few naysayers ("Chekhov's Gun", which I discuss at Rule #4 here*). Still others are good practice for most of the time but not all of the time ("Use Active Voice"); passive voice has its place in every work, but should be applied like a strong seasoning. Yet others are applicable only to the point that they help with clarity and avoid redundancy ("Avoid Adverbs"); there are adverbs in this blog entry. Then there is the assumption that every story is wrapped up like a Christmas present, which cannot apply in any realist or slice-of-life story.

What writing tips would I give, then? Not many. Aside from the basic "make sure your spelling and grammar are good", there are few blanket rules I would attach to any work of literature. No one ever built an ironclad by following the rule of using good-quality wood. That said, I see easily fixable mistakes again and again. Here are five:

• Show or Tell
• Coordinating Conjunctions Starting Sentences
• Comma Splices
• Familiarity Assumptions
• Names Again

Each of these tips naturally has an exception I state along with it.

The examples I give below are all of bad writing I then discuss. Anything indented should not be construed as good writing, as anything I would seek to have published (except as an example of bad writing, as here) or anything I would want to read.

Show or Tell. Whether you're abiding by "Show, Don't Tell", or telling because you need the story to advance faster, don't do both. In its most extreme form, showing and telling looks like this:

"I am wearing red," said the man who was wearing red.

In its less blatantly obvious form, showing and telling takes one of two main forms, although there doubtless others:

1. Describing something and then immediately telling what was described, or vice versa.

Arthur's cheeks flushed red. His hands balled into fists with trembling white knuckles. His breaths became heavy and short. His eyes lit up like fireballs. Make no bones about it, Arthur was angry.

The first four sentences show that Arthur is angry. What does the reader gain from being told Arthur is angry in the last sentence? Why does this sentence exist? Neither of those questions is answerable.

Bonus points for the hackneyed "Make no bones about it", especially in a story that may not even be in the first person.

The only notable exception to this rule is if the author wants to tip off that either the narrator or the speaker is lying. "I am wearing red," the man wearing nothing but blue said. The dialogue and narrative are barely describing the same thing at this point.

2. Using narration and dialogue to reach the same conclusion.

"Look... I... don't know if we can go on with this situation any longer. It's - just that I - I'm seeing someone else," she said in a nervous, stilted way.

Why does the reader need to be told that our character is speaking "in a nervous, stilted way" when it is clear from the structure of the dialogue? The dialogue tag "she said" is sufficient.

This is like the "man who was wearing red" example but subtler.

Never start a sentence with a coordinating conjunction. A coordinating conjunction is meant to connect two parts of a sentence. Starting a sentence with a coordinating conjunction is like installing a hinge on the wrong side of a door.

Bianca liked going to the confectionery to pick out the finest cakes for Sunday dessert. And she loved the taste of the crisp, sweet icing on her tongue.

The word "and" should either be deleted entirely, which means the second sentence should start with the word "she", or else the sentences should be combined. I would usually keep this as two sentences but it depends how central Bianca is to the story. Maybe her love of cake is only worth a sentence.

To unpack this further, imagine ending a sentence with a coordinating conjunction. To reprise our cake-purchaser Bianca:

Bianca liked going to the confectionery to pick out the finest cakes for Sunday dessert and. She loved the taste of the crisp, sweet icing on her tongue.

The quickest glance shows the first sentence here to be complete nonsense. The reader may ask "... and what?" This is a very reasonable question. The writer of the first Bianca passage should approach these passages the same way. The reader asks "...what and?"

Exceptions include dialogue and stream of consciousness. If we talked the way we wrote, conversations would be stilted and obtuse.

Never insert a comma splice. 

Separate thoughts are separated by a period. Quasi-separate thoughts are separated by a semicolon, uncommonly as writers should use semicolons. Commas connect parts of the same thought.

A comma, then, should never be in this part of a sentence:

The river flowed, the sun set.

The comma serves absolutely no purpose here, and also confuses the reader by creating the expectation that whatever follows it will relate directly to the flow of the river. It should be replaced with a period (more likely) or a semicolon (less likely).

To parrot the above rule: Exceptions include dialogue and stream of consciousness. If we talked the way we wrote, conversations would be stilted and obtuse.

Assume your reader doesn't know your characters.

Settings can be sufficiently familiar they need little introduction. Most English-language readers do not need to be told that New York City is in the United States. Although London isn't necessarily in England, any basic signpost can tell the reader the story takes place in London, England. A fictional setting probably requires some introduction but this can often be unraveled as the story requires. (For example, the first descriptions of Mordor in The Lord of the Rings hardly require the reader to know the location of the nearest post office.)

Characters can be anyone.

If a writer reprints a character sheet without giving any context to why the character is present, the reader is confused.

Uncle Carl is a good, honest man. He was born in 1958 to a family of dairy farmers who would always use the phrase "pass muster" and he took some very firm values with him when he went away to school. I saw him a lot in those days because he was caring for my mother's garden.

If this point by point description of Carl (which isn't well-written anyway) precedes any other mention of Carl, it takes the reader out of the story. If Carl hasn't been present yet, the reader isn't sure why he's being discussed in this way.** If Carl's existence hasn't been mentioned yet, the above passage sounds like someone accidentally copied and pasted in a passage from a different story.

The only exception is if the work of literature is a series of biographies, with the above passage beginning a section entitled "Uncle Carl" or something similar.

Names can be reused.

In an effort to avoid overusing character names, authors occasionally substitute in descriptions. This has the unfortunate effect of making it ambiguous to the reader how many characters are present.

Daria handed her paper to the teacher. The teacher's pen tapped each of the answers as she saw Daria had answered all but one of the fill-in-the-blank questions.

"Did you miss a question?" the teacher asked.

The shy girl never wanted to admit to not knowing the answer.

Is Daria shy? Presumably, at least two children in any given class of 20-30 is shy. Is the conversation only between Daria and the teacher, are there other students at the teacher's desk, or is the teacher making an announcement to the entire class? Replacing "The shy girl" with "Daria" fixes this problem.

Worse still is when a description may match more than one character but is adjectivized*** according to the author's own opinion of his or her work. The reader may perceive the characters differently, causing confusion over who is speaking. Using our character Daria from the above passage, meet her classmate Evelyn:

Daria handed her paper to the teacher. The teacher's pen tapped each of the answers as she saw Daria had answered all but one of the fill-in-the-blank questions. Evelyn stood behind Daria, a trembling finger tracing over the answers on her own incomplete test.

"Did you miss a question?" the teacher asked.

The shy girl never wanted to admit to not knowing the answer.

Which of Daria or Evelyn is "the shy girl"? Is Daria shyer than Evelyn or vice versa? Even if previous scenes have shown Evelyn being talkative and bubbly, maybe she has text anxiety. Again, replacing "The shy girl" with the character's name makes the reader's life easier.

The author can also specify who the teacher is addressing (e.g.: "the teacher asked Daria") but there is still no need to introduce an already established character as an adjective-noun combination.

The exception to this rule is if the author is attempting to keep a character's identity secret. There could be a crucial plot point regarding the reader's lack of knowledge of which student is shyer, although that sort of identity game is more likely in a spy novel or whodunit.

-----

*My writing has improved substantially since I wrote that blog post. My formatting appears to have improved as well.

**Carl's presence in a photo album would still indicate that he is present.

***This can be a word.

September's Book: Dictators without Borders

Dictators without Borders by Alexander Cooley and John Heathershaw
Politics (2017 - 231 pp.)

Dictators without Borders explores the connections between internal security measures and global financing efforts conducted by the ex-Soviet dictators of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Internally, these dictators use foreign direct investment to prop up their regimes; externally, they set up shell corporations to hide funds offshore, and then hunt down enemies through "extraterritorial security measures".* The global aspect is very much in step with these countries' histories: Cooley and Heathershaw use the Russian Empire's overseas agents and the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940 as historical inspirations, and time the book so that it was released a year after the Panama Papers.** 

Under the heading aptly titled "Our argument", Cooley and Heathershaw state: "In this book we argue that Central Asia is best understood by focusing on the sprawling, informal transnational links between elites from Astana to London and Bishkek to Beijing." (23) These links include Western and other banks, law firms and real estate brokers. Cooley and Heathershaw conclude by arguing that Western governments can quell the exodus of investment funds through proper due diligence checks and through greater enforcement of anti-corruption laws.

Central Asia's role as historical Silk Road is prevalent in Western media, such as major parts of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt. (See, for example, "The Alchemist", set in Samarkand, in present-day Uzbekistan.) Here's a map of the Silk Road and a map of current Central Asia.) In Dictators without Borders, the Silk Road becomes a metaphor for the connection between Central Asian governments and foreign^ investors, and transformation of countries like Kyrgyzstan into de facto inland offshores.^^

The American "New Silk Road Initiative" and the Chinese "One Belt, One Road" (OBOR) project figure prominently. Each, however, has run into the virtually ubiquitous roadblock of Central Asian restriction of private enterprise, which effectively funnels foreign investment into state coffers. Regarding the American airfield in Kyrgyzstan during former president Kurmanbek Bakiyev's regime, "US Defence Secretary Robert Gates refers in his memoir to Bakiyev's 'amazingly corrupt' government, which 'saw our continued need for the airfield as a rich source of revenue or, as I called it, extortion.'" (176) Bakiyev's son Maxim now lives in a 3.5-million-pound mansion in Surrey, UK. Regarding OBOR, Cooley and Heathershaw note the difficulty of making highways profitable when they do not lead to businesses: "...merely building infrastructure (the hardware) within a environment as prone to rent-seeking and poor governance as Central Asia is unlikely to reform entrenched crony capitalism - quite the opposite in fact, as these upgraded networks may provide additional opportunities for cronyism and the distribution of informal payments." (179) This mirrors the assertion in The Dictator's Handbook that any dictator under threat immediately invests in a high-quality road toward an international airport.

In addition to the book's Silk Road story, there are four spotlight chapters, one on each country, that concern one country's regime and often a wanted person. Many of the wanted people are ex-regime insiders, such as Kazakhstan's Mukhtar Ablyazov or Uzbekistan's Gulnara Karimova. Others are political opponents, such as Obidkhon qori Nazarov (Uzbekistan) or Umarali Kuvvatov (Tajikistan). Details of the state-led persecutions vary from the expected, such as Nursultan Nazarbayev ordering Ablyazov's assets frozen, to the terrifying, such as the 2012 attempted assassination of Nazarov in Stockholm by way of "three or four" bullets to the head or the 2015 poisoning-shooting of Kuvvatov by a Tajik government agent in Istanbul.+ For reference, Cooley and Heathershaw provide a map of disappearances, renditions and assassinations from Uzbekistan, (210) and the same from Tajikistan. (217) The level of detail here, from who owns which shell corporations to who is imprisoned where, is at its peak.

Dictators without Borders also includes a series of flowcharts that escalate in their complexity as the book goes on, from the relatively simple chart showing Ablyazov's former ownership of BTA Bank (59) to the labyrinthine network connecting Swedish telecom giant TeliaSonera's investments to the Karimov family's personal wealth, resulting in a $406 million windfall to the Karimovs and their associates. (122) The $406 million included in that one investment appears tiny by that point in the book, as Cooley and Heathershaw show repeatedly that these regimes come out with windfalls as high as 25% of their countries' GDPs. Little of this money goes toward usual Western-style public expenditures.

The only issue I can take with Dictators without Borders is the authors' reliance on the dictators' lack of evidence in criminal prosecutions being directly followed by the condemnations that themselves lack sufficient evidence. Cooley and Heathershaw are fond of saying that a crime was "probably" connected to a dictator, yet "probably" is also the kind of language dictators use when discerning who committed which financial crime. As much as the reader sympathizes with various hunted quasi-criminals over the dictators who chase them, it's hard to look at someone like Ablyazov and see the picture of innocence.

I don't usually give a book a 10 for Educational Content, but the sheer volume and variety of sources that went into Dictators without Borders is astounding. Cooley, Heathershaw and the interviewees they credit went through everything from UK legal proceedings to NGO reports to news stories. The numerous interviewees, most of whom have pseudonyms, drew on many of their own terrifying experiences. People with knowledge of Russian, Kazakh, Uzbek, Tajik and Kyrgyz were required. At the end of the book (Appendices 1-3), Cooley and Heathershaw list authoritative charts of Central Asian expats' real estate holdings, Uzbek Stage 3 (disappearance/rendition phase) exiles and Tajik Stage 3 exiles.

If there's one way Dictators without Borders could have been even more educational (up to 11?), it would have been a chapter on Turkmenistan. Turkmenistan is mentioned briefly in the opening and closing chapters, and figures prominently on the book's cover. It's also one of the world's most fascinating countries, from the statues of Saparmurat "Turkmenbashi" Niyazov in the capital Ashgabat; to Niyazov's memoir-meets-Bible the Ruhnama, of which I've read approximately the first seventy pages; to its strikingly extensive natural gas reserves. That said, Turkmen is not the easiest language to learn, and independent journalists are notoriously difficult to locate in Turkmenistan, so a lack of a full chapter on Turkmenistan is understandable.

Ease of Reading: 3

Educational Content: 10

*This is a diplomatic way of saying "intimidation, unmeritorious Interpol Red Notices, legal proceedings in foreign courts, extradition back to the home country where torture may occur, and, in some cases, assassination".

**For those itching to make drone strike or Guantanamo Bay comparisons, Cooley and Heathershaw address this during the preface: "There is a qualitative distinction between the national security rationales of the US and UK (questionable though they are) and the regime security rationales of Central Asian states. In an autocracy, there is no such thing as an opposition and even opponents in exile are fair game." (xiii)

^Typically, foreign investors are any combination of American, British (including British Virgin Islands shell corporations owned by Central Asian or Russian nationals), Russian and Chinese. There are also numerous other investors, including Sweden's TeliaSonera, that arise within the book.

^^An "inland offshore" is a jurisdiction where money can be hidden or laundered due to lax corporate registry and financial reporting requirements, much like a typical island tax haven (e.g.: British Virgin Islands), but landlocked.

+If you're wondering what a "poisoning-shooting is", Cooley and Heathershaw describe in detail:

On 5 March 2015, Kuvvatov, his wife and two children were invited to dinner at the house of Sulaimon Qayumov, a 30-year-old Tajik citizen who had been in Istanbul for several months and expressed sympathy for [Tajik political opposition] Group 24. Kuvvatov's wife told Radio Ozodi that she, her husband and their sons "felt sick after consuming food offered by Qayumov and rushed out for fresh air. An ambulance eventually arrived at 10:30 p.m. When they were outside, Hafizova said, an unidentified man approached Kuvvatov from behind and fired a single shot to his head before fleeing. Kuvvatov died at the scene." (216)

August's Book: Burning Chrome

Burning Chrome by William Gibson
Science Fiction (1986/2003* - 204 pp.)

Finally, some William Gibson on this blog!

Burning Chrome is, roughly speaking, his ten most famous short stories he published from 1981-1986, so around the time he released Neuromancer. He wasn't as well-known during this period as he would be later on, but he wrote some of his most iconic material. It's almost all the first wave of cyberpunk. Enough type has been shed on the fusion of cybernetics with humanity that I'll focus on the few of the more obscure aspects of Burning Chrome here: the way it rockets its characters into its settings, and its use of clipped style.

Gibson's love of Eastern Hemisphere settings comes through in stories like "Johnny Mnemonic", "Red Star, Winter Orbit" and "New Rose Hotel" . "Johnny Mnemonic"'s opening of Yakuza, "Squids", a.k.a. Superconducting Quantum Interference Detectors, (10) and Jones the drug-addled talking dolphin blends Japanese gangster movies with Blade Runner-esque cyberpunk. (In a bizarre way of Gibson predicting the future, though, Jones's talking is surprisingly realistic.)

"Red Star, Winter Orbit" deals with the disturbing USSR-era term "military custody", (94) is based on politically motivated psychiatric treatment. (Although scary Cold War-era institutionalization was available in other countries, including the US, as well.) From its beginning, Gibson makes the Western reader feel like a foreigner: "He'd never liked the boy's father, either - an easygoing party man, long ago settled into lecture tours, a dacha on the Black Sea, American liquor, French suits, Italian shoes..." (85) The geographical otherness the Western reader feels reinforces the strangeness of the stories' more overtly science fiction features.

Similarly, the titular hotel of "New Rose Hotel" is just outside Narita Airport in Tokyo, yet the characters try to transform away from Japanese-ness. The initial description of the person to whom the story is narrated is "Eurasian, half-gaijin... Dark European eyes, Asian cheekbones" (110), and then later, the same character says, "I'm Dutch now, you said. I'll want a new look." (117) A meeting between the narrator and a Welshman in Berlin is for the express purpose of "disappearing" one of the few still-totally-Japanese characters, Hiroshi, yet the narrator admits that "Europe is a dead museum." (116)**

Gibson's American settings are full of drug addicts. In "The Gernsback Continuum", the narrator suffers from amphetamine psychosis. (33) In "Fragments of a Hologram Rose", Parker wakes to find unexplained cocaine in his pocket. By the time "Burning Chrome" hits, the compilation has read like a story in which the characters are so fried they are no longer real; they are instead distinguishable from aspects of a computer program, "Chrome: her pretty childface smooth as steel..." while Rikki acts like a video game character. (180)

In "Dogfight", after Deke falls asleep while operating the flight simulator, his experience combines Parker's cocaine-planted awakening in "The Gernsback Continuum" with the programming cartridge as power model of "Burning Chrome": "He woke to the rancid smell of frying krillcakes and winced with hunger. No cash, either. Well, there were plenty of student types in the stack. Bound to be one who'd like to score a programming unit." (155)

Stylistically, a few key patterns emerge throughout Burning Chrome. One is the clipped, conversational, fragmentized nature of Gibson's writing. This ties into his often first-person narratives of people who think in short bursts. In "The Belonging Kind", when the protagonist Coretti's obsession with his unnamed, prospective love interest takes over his life: "He'd missed classes too many times. He'd taken to watching the hotel when he could, even in the daytime. He'd been seen in too many bars. He never seemed to change his clothes." (54) In "Hinterlands", when Toby discusses the space travel highway: "The promise of pain. It's there each time." (75) The block-quoted Rules 1-3 add to the staccato narration. In "The Winter Market", the album Kings of Sleep obsesses the characters.^ Our narrator describes part of it as "Amazing. Freedom and death, right there, right there, razor's edge, forever." (132)

If Burning Chrome has any weakness, it's not to do with Gibson's storytelling. Gibson could have used a better editor; sentences frequently start with coordinating conjunctions, which is one of the few writing rules I actually think shouldn't be broken. Secondly, the last five stories take up a combined 60% of the compilation, which makes it feel longer as it progresses. This is tough to avoid, as 8 of the 10 stories are within a page or two of 25 pages, but the two shorter stories (8 and 16 pages each) could have been split up rather than placed back to back. Again, no fault of Gibson's, as far as I know.

Burning Chrome is sophisticated enough for a cold night in with a snifter of cognac, but I read it on the balcony with a beer.

Ease of Reading: 6
Educational Content: 2^^

*Burning Chrome was first released as a compilation in 1986. My edition has an additional preface Gibson wrote in 2003.

**Funnily, though, West Germany still exists in the future of "The Winter Market". (125)

^Perhaps a reference to another fictitious, never quoted, omnipresent King in Yellow?

^^I originally had this as a 1. Click the link above where I refer to Jones the dolphin's conversational skills.

How Was Your Day?

Don’t ever ask me, “How was your day?”

Every day is a chance for me to accomplish something great. In a day, I can run the fastest mile I’ve ever run. I can write the greatest fiction I’ve ever written. I can talk down a litigation client from a completely untenable position. I can show a friend around a surprisingly high number of cities in North America. There’s a lot I can do, and a lot of that only takes a few hours. More than likely, my day is still going.

This question is often asked as early as four or five in the afternoon. With any luck, it might be asked at seven or eight. Why ask it then, when there’s so much left of the day? Why not ask it at 11:59? One-third of anyone’s life happens between the hours of 4:00PM and midnight. One quarter of anyone’s life happens between 6:00PM and midnight. Why wish those hours away?

Using a standard Western life expectancy of 80, any given person lives 20 years of life between 6:00PM and midnight. So much can be done in an hour, or a minute, or a second. Why wish away two decades of someone’s life? Saying your day is over at some point in the late afternoon has a greater loss of average life expectancy than smoking.

Don’t ask me how my day was. It’s not over yet.

July's Book: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Late again, but I'll be early soon!

--------------------------------------------

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Literature (1962 - 272 pp.)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is my first exposure to the Beat Generation in years. During what mainstream society dubbed "the American High", Ken Kesey sets a chilling tale inside a psychiatric facility. Kesey's experiences working as a maintenance staffer in a psychiatric facility in Oregon were a direct inspiration for a story that, although set in one of the most optimistic societies in world history, presents few options for its characters other than complete bleakness. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's characters, especially Bromden, Randle Patrick McMurphy and Nurse Ratched, are examined 10 billion ways in numerous publications, so I'll stick to my views on the setting and plot.

As someone who can barely stand the sight of blood, Kesey's descriptions of contemporary 1950s psychiatric surgery made me lose sleep. Both forms of lobotomy once used in the United States (prefrontal and transorbital) are discussed at length, through the eyes of the narrator Bromden, who never sees a surgery being performed but sees the aftereffects. Ruckly, one of the less heralded characters, receives a transorbital lobotomy near the start of the book that leaves him with "black-and-blue eyes" and barely responsive. (20) Another transorbital lobotomy near the end of the book gives a character "a face milk-white, except for the heavy purple bruises around the eyes" that renders him "like one of those store dummies". (269) The patients also compare lobotomy to castration.* (165) These lobotomy horror stories remind me of Authorson v Canada.** a class action in which Canadian war veterans sued for the interest accrued on their pension funds; the representative plaintiff Joseph Authorson had received a prefrontal lobotomy while in a psychiatric institution in London, Ontario.

Electroshock therapy (EST) is not presented in a much better light. Bromden frequently wakes from bouts of EST, which leaves him in a mental fog so severe the reader is forced to question the veracity of many of the book's events. When the other patients explain EST to McMurphy, what results is possibly the scariest lines of the book:

McMurphy shakes his head. "Hoo-wee! Electricity through the head. Man, that's like electrocuting a guy for murder."

"The reasons for both activities are much more closely related than you might think; they are both cures." (164)

Patient death is common in the facility, whether by natural causes or unnatural causes such as drowning (151), none of which appears to concern Ratched or many of the other staff.

The level of cruelty the reader sees from Bromden's perspective is comparable to a kangaroo court: "...it might be beneficial that he receive some shock therapy - unless he realizes his mistakes." (235) This invites an immediate comparison to communism. (236) The patients' words and actions are written off as delusions of their compromised mental states, which has the horrifying side-effect of making everything the staff says right, and everything a patient says wrong. In this way, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest becomes a tale about scientific veracity, and even about morality as well; can a "wrong" philosophical, or even moral, belief be recast as mental illness in order to attack the believer?*** Back to the staff's self-proclaimed inherent rightness, what if the staff decide to perform EST or a lobotomy on someone who isn't insane? The Rosenhan experiment, conducted only a few short years after Kesey released One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, identifies the possibility of misdiagnosis or staff misconduct in psychiatric institutions.

The entire psychiatric facility is, in its own way, subject to lobotomy and EST. When Bromden briefly wanders the facility at night, after evading bedtime, his escape of sorts doesn't reveal some sort of Animal Farm-style elitism. Instead, he sees "dreamy doll faces of the workmen" and the furnace's fire "like a thundering pulse". (80) Even when there is no staffer to inflict the facility's violent treatments on Bromden, he sees them everywhere he goes.

The main events in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest are thankfully unthinkable in 2018. However, it remains far scarier than most horror novels, and its themes of science and rightness remain relevant.

Ease of Reading: 6
Educational Content: 5

NOTE: 31-year old Billy's mother describes him as "a middle-aged man" despite only being 31 years old. She also treats him like a child. (247) As a 31-year old, I can attest that I'm not yet middle-aged! Perhaps Billy's mother is the crazy one.

*For more literal castration, consider Kyu in "Awake to Emptiness".

**2003 SCC 39 at paras 21-24.

***For example, the psychological/philosophical/moral idea put forth in this study claiming that belief in meritocracy may have mental health consequences.

Spring-Summer Highlights

I don't usually post much about myself on social media, but in honour of my 31st birthday today, I will.

May, June, July and August (already) have been exciting months. I've:

• seen Angel Witch live at Lee's Palace
• gone to the Preakness
• seen most of the National Mall in Washington DC
• hiked Mount Nemo
• made a root beer kit
• made my own hot sauce for the first time in a while
• had my dog's picture on the wall of my local pub
• attended the Doug Ford inauguration party
• gone to Ripley's Aquarium
• gone to Niagara on the Lake
• shown friends from across North America around my hometown Toronto
• just today, walked from Roncesvalles to Etobicoke Point.

Pictures to follow ASAP. You won't miss these!

This is what I do when I'm not reading, whether law or literature, apparently.
(July's book coming soon as well.)

Design Space in Fiction

Growing up, one of my favourite card games was Magic: the Gathering. Wizards of the Coast lead designer Mark Rosewater has a fantastically written column, Making Magic, that goes into the details of what it takes to create Magic cards. With their endless permutations and their medieval-ish fantasy themes, Magic cards have a lot in common with fiction books.

One of my favourite concepts Rosewater explores in Making Magic is something called "design space".

In short, design space is what hasn't been done within a specific medium but that is a logical offshoot from what is currently available. It's the innovation that fills in the gaps. For example, if the first two Magic cards ever printed had been a red creature with 1 power and a red creature with 3 power, "red creature with 2 power" becomes an obvious card design.

How does this relate to fiction?

• Substantial portions of fiction, especially genre fiction, are effectively fictional adaptations of non-fictional subjects. Historical fiction adapts history. Most science fiction adapts physics, chemistry or engineering. Didactic instructional tales frequently adapt religion or philosophy.
• Which other subjects can be adapted? I've been doing this with diplomatic history. political science, industrial relations and economics in my upcoming novel, Burning Clouds. By digging deeper into these less-mined fields, I'm using design space.

• Related concepts can be substituted for each other. For example, houses can be made of wood instead of bricks. Positive: houses can be built faster. Negative: wildfires are suddenly terrifying. In fiction, this usually occurs more as "what if dragons breathed ice instead of fire?" or "what if people had flying cars instead of... non-flying cars?"
• I explore this concept in depth when discussing the replacement of fantasy-style magic with mysticism. To ape my above example, Positive: characters have greater reliance on technology, precluding Harry Potter-style wizard luddite-ism. Negative: battle scenes become less Tigana and more "let's scope out our enemies from a mile away and then lob artillery shells at them". I'm thankful I write such good diplomatic conference scenes.

• Fiction often borrows from other media. The possibilities here are endless. Borrowing from modernist literary theory? Why not also borrow from modernist architecture?
• I've done this in coining the term "literary hyperrealism". By combining Henry James-style realism, which I've been reading for years, with influences from hyperrealist painting, I've been working on a style (or is it a genre?) in which the action follows the characters so closely the reader can feel every breath, twitch or drop of sweat. See this post and this Quora answer for more.

Once you start thinking of established genres as hollow rather than solid, or as frames rather than as buildings, you can start filling in the gaps. Rather than describe someone else's world, you can squeeze into that spot within a genre, or between genres, to create your own.