Well, it’s time to shift to my own hosting.

As much as I love the free hosting on WordPress, there was too much that I wanted to play around with and tweak. I’ve been wanting for a long time to have the option of creating a more professional blog, with better accessibility to my short stories, book reviews, etc. So I asked the incomparable Andy to help me out.

This blog has now been exported to http://www.ruzkin.com. http://www.christopher-ruz.com also redirects to the new site – I’d been thinking about possible pseudonyms for quite a while (because Hayes-Kossmann is such a huge, galumphing surname) and Christopher Ruz seemed to fit.

As of writing this post there’s still a lot of work to do on www.ruzkin.com – I need to fix/tweak the banner, copy over my blogroll manually, and repair all the internal links. If you’re browsing and you see anything that’s broken or links back here instead, please point it out!

Thanks for the good time, all. Hopefully I’ll catch you over at the new site too. If you’ve linked to this site, it’d be totally rad if you adjusted your links.

Cheers!

Ruz

DAAAAANG.

I was feeling really down after reviewing Spook Country, like I’d somehow slipped sideways into a parallel universe of science fiction where I’d managed to read a totally different version of Spook Country to everyone else. Then a box of Brasyl landed in the bookshop and even though the cover reminded me of clown vomit I found folk all over the net saying it was magnificent. So I took a copy home and gave it a go.

I’m so, so glad.

Ian McDonald essentially writes like William Gibson raised in a third world country. They have similar flashes of imagery, the same almost stream-of-consciousness style of narration, similarly flawed characters, driven by prior mistakes or desires they don’t want to acknowledge. But while Gibson revels in the neon glamour of Chiba and Harajuku and downtown Manhattan, Ian McDonald rolls in the slums. His 2004 novel River of Gods revolved around the Ganges of the mid twenty-first century, while Brasyl is (predictably) set in Rio De Janeiro and Sao Paulo.

Not just the rich, upper-class compounds, though. McDonald spends as much time exploring the trash-heap favelas as he does the high-speed life of Brazilian reality TV. Sometimes his descriptions are so pure and crisp that you can smell the filth in the air.

The burned skeletons of construction machines still smoked, the orange paint blackened and bleached down to bare metal… The police barely glanced at Marcelina Hoffman as she joined the throng moving up towards the street market. Anyone could go in… the walls were only there to protect passing drivers from ricochets and stray bullets. Anyone could leave, anytime, during working hours. Surf boys with great muscles strolled, boards under arms, down to the beach at the Barra Da Tijuaca. Their Havaianas crunched broken glass and empty cartridge cases…

So, what’s it all about?

Brasyl follows three distinct storylines of roughly equal importance. In 2006, Marcelina Hoffman works for a reality TV channel, trying her hardest to think up the Next Big Thing and win her commission. Her latest idea – leaving easy-to-steal sports cars in slum areas and then filming the ensuing police chase – doesn’t go nearly as well as hoped. But there’s a bigger problem – somebody masquerading as her is trying to systematically destroy her career and relationships from the inside. Jealous rival? Evil twin? Who knows?

In 2032, Edson is in similar trouble. In between petty theft and identity-swapping with friends, he’s fallen in love with a girl who works in the highly illegal field of quantum computing. It’s all fun-on-the-run, until his friends start dying… and other supposedly dead folk start turning up again.

Finally, in 1732, Father Quinn is on a mission. He’s been sent from Ireland to the wilderness of Brazil to locate a renegade priest who has hidden in the jungle and started his own flock of converts. Quinn has asked God many times for a task most difficult, and this one fits the description. There are a lot of nasty things hiding in the Brazilian jungle…

When I started Brasyl I had no idea how these three stories would tie together. As it turns out, the links are only momentary, but still vital to the overall story. You won’t see Father Quinn’s ancestors teaming up with Edson, for example, but there are threads binding everybody together over the centuries. Sometimes these links aren’t as elegant as I’d hoped, but they all worked, in the end.

What’s also impressive is that these three parallel stories run at full pace from beginning to end. Father Quinn sailing into the darkness of unexplored jungle in 1732 is no less exciting than Edson running from the police in 2032. If anything, the only story to drag is Marcelina’s, and even then it’s only for a few chapters before everything explodes.

Is Brasyl fast? Hell yes, it’s fast. This is a sci-fi thriller at heart, wrapped up in a delicious layer of social commentary. All three characters are constantly hopping from crisis to crisis without ever seeming too lucky or too deus-ex-machina’d (is that even a word?) But, unlike many other sci-fi thrillers, I never felt like the story had left me behind. I love Neuromancer to death, but there were a lot of times when I felt I’d missed vital information. Never so in Brasyl. Everything is balanced and well explained without being patronising.

Does Brasyl have any flaws? A few, although you might not find them as jarring as I. The constant stream of Portugese is bewildering, although by the end of the novel most of the slang has been put in context at least once. But if words like futebol, pichadores and capoeria confuse you, then you might want to bring a dictionary.

My second major complaint would be the level of coincidence. There are some very large, far reaching conspiracies at play in Brasyl, even if they don’t seem apparent until the halfway point. Now, maybe I’m just a whiner, but it’s frustrating as hell when side-characters that have nothing at all to do with these conspiracies are suddenly revealed to either be in-the-know, or to be the grand arbiter of the Brazilian Illuminati equivalent.

Even so, you know what? I didn’t care. I hit the coincidence point, noted it down with a frown, and kept on reading. Because I cared. Because Edson was real to me, and Marcelina was an enigma I needed to solve, and because I was desperate for Father Quinn to survive his task most difficult.

Even when Brasyl stumbles, it gets up fast. The remaining 95% is excellent. I don’t care if the language is sometimes awkward, or if a few of the twists are outright silly. I blew through Brasyl at a rocketing pace and when I put it down I wanted to start again.

Motorcycle chases, reality-altering drugs, gang war, reality TV, graffiti, sex, quantum computing, murder, religious indoctrination, futebol. It’s rad, guys. Pick it up.

In the late 1800’s, a Scot called Edward Le Roy was working around the docks in the new, wild land of Australia. There were a lot of sailors there freezing their various genitalia off because the seas out those parts were fucking harsh, and no matter how many woolly jumpers you stack on your nipples still turned into little black diamond-hard lumps the first time you sailed into the wind. Edward needed a solution.

“What,” he asked, “would make the wind my bitch?” Then he looked up at the sails of the ships passing through the dock and had his answer.

Sailcloth back then was thick cotton canvas treated with oil, which made a material so fucking manly that it turned gale winds – an elemental force of destruction – into your personal servant. Edward Le Roy took this material and made it into a set of rather smart casual jackets. Sailors all around the Australian coast were able to head into the piss-thick sleet of a coastal storm with their middle fingers up. Stockmen out on the northern plains watched over their flocks through freezing night and rain heavy enough to drown in.

In 1933, Edward finally registered a trademark for his beautiful, manly jackets, and a legend was born.

Driza-bone.

I’ve been looking for a jacket like this a long time. Bomber cut, nice fit, warm as hell, built to last the apocalypse. If anyone ever nukes Melbourne I’ll just curl into a ball and throw this jacket over my head and then wait till the asphalt cools.

Jackets are for life, people. Not just for Christmas.

Well, in all the excitement of getting close to the end of Alpha Slip, I totally forgot to mark my 100th post! My first How-To article, Plot vs Story, capped off the centenary. Congratulations, Plot vs Story!

I really wanted to have another short ready to post here before the end of the month, but I haven’t even stopped to look at anything but Alpha Slip since May. This isn’t the quickest I’ve ever written a novel, but it’s the quickest I’ve ever written a novel that I liked. I’m thinking this draft will probably end up at the 80k mark. Then the second draft (which will be the first I release out to close friends for opinions) will be about the same – I can see at least 10-15k worth of rubbish that needs cutting, but there’s also a TON of secondary characterisation I completely forgot to include in this draft, leaving most of the characters as thin as a sneeze. If you missed my chatting about Alpha Slip entirely, I posted the first three chapters here.

Also, my Why We Fight article usurped my Mx Sucks Plebian Balls article as most popular post on the blog, which just goes to show all you folk are suckers for blood and nudity.

I just finished reading Brasyl, so I’ll have a (very positive) review of that up soon. In the meantime, keep writing, keep dancing, keep loving.

I read Steven Wells’ article The English Patient many months ago and found it both hilarious and exceptionally depressing at the same time. It was a very personal tale of the complete inadequacies of the Philadelphia hospital system, and instantly convinced me to never, ever, get sick in the USA.

I had pretty much forgotten about that article until I saw on Warren Ellis’s blog today that Steven Wells had passed away, finally succumbing to the cancer that had made his last years so hellish. I went back to the Philadelphia Weekly site and re-read the article – and the two follow-ups – once again shocked by Steven’s honesty, candidness, and ability to admit his fears and failings in the face of death.

Then on Thurs., Jan. 29, 2009, I got a phone call from my gastroenterologist. He told me I’ve got a cancer called enteropathy-associated T-cell lymphoma— which only afflicts a small percentage of the small percentage of people who develop celiac disease. And as cancers go, it’s a bastard.

Anyhoo. I put the phone down and let out a huge, self-pitying “Why me?” The answer, of course, is the same as the answer to Travis’ shit-awful 1999 international breakthrough hit, “Why Does It Always Rain on Me?” Because you’re a fucking dick. Now shut the fuck up and grow a pair.

Linked for your convenience: Steven Wells’ final articles on cancer, health care, and accepting the end. RIP Steven Wells – the world will miss you.

The English Patient

Cell Out

His Final Column

My last post got me a lot of reactions from people who don’t usually read this blog. Some were good, even encouraging. Others were extremely disparaging, or simply assumed that this combat training is nothing more than a try-hard fight club.

I’ll put down a few points and hope everyone absorbs them.

1) This is not Fight Club.

Whenever I try to explain what I do to people, they instantly jump to images of Brad Pitt and Edward Norton beating the snot out of each other in a dimly lit basement while everyone else stands around and cheers. The Fight Club of the movie (and book) is a place where grown men smack each other around as an escape from the doldrums of daily life. The only rules (as everyone knows) – no belts, no shoes, only one fight at a time, and the iconic “You don’t talk about Fight Club.”

My combat training is as far from Fight Club as possible. There are no mindless brawls. Nobody is there simply to hurt someone else, or even to win. All those who attend are very close friends. I love some of these guys like brothers. I trust them with my life and they trust me with theirs.

This is not bareknuckle boxing. We use boxing gloves and rubber knives. When not using gloves, we aren’t allowed to punch – we only take the gloves off when grappling. There are mats across the floor and carpet everywhere else. No hard corners, no concrete slabs.

Unlike “Fight Club”, there are many rules which change depending on the exercise. For example, in the 1 vs 16 fight, each fight ended as soon as the two fighters went to the ground. That exercise was a test of endurance. It was designed to be impossible to win. In another exercise, designed to train spacial awareness and reaction times, a single fighter was surrounded by all the other participants. Anyone could start a fight with the person in the centre, just by calling their name. The attack could come from any direction at any time. As soon as that attack was fended off, that fight was also over. If you had an image of two people just punching each other over and over in the face, you’re mistaken.

Most of the people on site are trained in first aid, and we always have a full stash of medical supplies handy. This is not the first time we’ve run these sessions. We’re not going off half-cocked.

2) It’s not that dangerous.

That photo of me below looks pretty nasty, I admit. But when you examine it objectively, you realise I have a horribly swollen eye and a lot of abrasions. That’s not much. If I was ever attacked on the street I’d expect to have black eyes, a broken jaw, lacerations, broken fingers and possibly stab wounds within five minutes. Yet over six hours of hardcore, mentally exhausting and physically painful combat training, I had a black eye and some carpet burn.

Rugby, our semi-national sport, is played in just about every highschool in the ACT and NSW. Players often end up with black eyes, missing teeth, broken noses, crushed fingers… but hey, that’s a normal sport, so I guess it’s okay? What about gymnastics? I still haven’t forgotten the girl at Erindale gym snapping her neck when she bailed a double-front onto the mats. Two thumbs up for gymnastics!

How many people break their legs skiiing every year, or their arms, or run into something at very high speed and die? But I guess skiing is pretty rad, and you get to wear some great snowsuits, so let’s just sweep those statistics under the carpet, hey?

My friend punching me in the head with a boxing glove on is a lot softer than a tree, and the tree doesn’t know first aid. Considering the knowledge of the people I train with, the environment in which we train, the medical equipment on hand and our own love for each other as friends, not enemies, this combat training is as safe as any sport you can name. Except perhaps chess. If you’ve ever trained rugby, gridiron, ice hockey, boxing, karate, gymnastics, skateboarding, skiing or snowboarding, or ever gone skydiving, bungee jumping, flown in a light aircraft or gone scuba-diving… you’ve been in much more dangerous situations than I, and you have no right to lecture.

3) Melbourne, like all cities, isn’t safe.

In my last post I mentioned a stabbing murder just down the road from my house. Here’s another story, and this one doesn’t have a news link, because it happened to two friends of mine.

These two (whose names I’ll withhold) were walking at about 9pm through the city when they were confronted by a gang of about 10 youths. These kids didn’t demand money, or mobile phones. They just started shouting “Let’s fuck them up! Let’s stab them! Throw them off the bridge!” That was all the warning my friends got.

It was a ten-on-two fight, which is obviously unwinnable. So my friends had to break free of the group and run. Keep in mind this was after the bashing had begun. Both were already injured – one of my friends had been knocked out by having his head rammed into a wall, had woken up on the ground, and then had to run blind because he couldn’t see through the blood in his eyes. They only made it because my other friend held him up and called directions. The gang chased them the entire way, only giving up when they got inside Flinders.

This didn’t happen down some dodgy alleyway. This was on the Immigration Bridge, crossing from Southbank to the CBD. There were onlookers, but nobody came to help. Nobody called the police. That’s just how things go, these days. Gang assaults don’t just happen to other people. They happen to friends and family, and eventually yourself.

I’ve personally been assaulted once in Canberra, and have had people try to assault me (unsuccessfully) twice in Melbourne. One time I got away by pure luck – the second time I managed to role-reverse and intimidate my would-be mugger into walking away using skills I learned at previous combat training sessions. If you wanted any proof that this is worthwhile, that was it. Nobody really heard about the second incident because nothing happened – but if I hadn’t had that previous training, and the confidence to make myself look big and ready to break heads, you would have all seen a blog post called Ow ow ow I got bashed and robbed boo hoo to Melbourne. Maybe you wouldn’t have heard anything. Maybe he would’ve just picked me as weak, stabbed me and walked away. You never know.

To the folk who have told me to quit this training – I respect your concern for my health, but it’s not going to happen. It may have already saved my life once. I hope I never need to use what I’ve learned, but I’d rather have these skills and this knowledge along with the bruises than have to walk the streets afraid. This training gives me strength – physically as well as mentally. I can’t think of anyone I know that wouldn’t benefit from trying something similar.

As always, love to all my friends and family – even those who think I’m a dummy.

There is purity in a fistfight.

You’re given a problem to solve – one or more opponents, all angry, all hungry. Your tools are your own body and the skills you’ve brought with you. There is no planning, no preparation. Only action and reaction. The stakes are not money or fame or a promotion. If you lose, you expect to die. When you’re faced with a choice between giving it everything or giving away everything, you have to know how far your body will go. How much pain you can take. How much effort it will take to throw a punch over and over. How long you can stay conscious with an arm around your throat.

A lot of people won’t understand why I take part in combat training that leaves me unable to see, unable to move. Sure, they say, self defense is important. But can’t you train karate in a dojo? Learn self-defense techniques without taking so much damage?

The simple truth of training martial arts is that a sparring match is not a fight. Karate skills are useless against five men with knives, or a bottle over the eyes. It doesn’t matter how hard you can kick if you get cornered in an alley by kids who have no interest in robbing you, don’t give a shit what’s in your pockets – they want blood for the sake of blood.

I know people who are devout pacifists. They believe that you can talk your way out of any situation, if you keep a cool head. That violence passes around some people and is attracted to others. That if you go out prepared for a fight, a fight will come to you, but if you walk the streets in a peaceful and loving state of mind, violence will go elsewhere.

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

Violence occurs to good, innocent people on a daily basis. It doesn’t matter whether you live in the rich or the poor parts of town because gangs with knives don’t respect residential zoning. Less than a month ago, a man named Luke Mitchell went to the aid of a kid being beaten up on Sydney Rd, Melbourne. The kid’s attackers ran away, and everyone thought that was the end of the affair. That is, until the two Thai attackers got in their car and followed Mr. Mitchell to a nearby 7-11, where they stabbed him to death in front of the 7-11 attendant. This happened about a kilometre from my house, between my place and the local shops.

I say again – bad shit happens to good people. There is no magical karmic balancer that lets you talk your way out of every situation. Unless you spend the rest of your life locked in a padded bunker, there’s a good chance random violence will come to you, or somebody you love. That’s when you’re faced with the choice.

So I do combat training that teaches no moves, no techniques, no tricks. Half of the purpose of this training is to illustrate just how unprepared the average person is for a fight; that, even as fit and strong as I am, I’d be lucky to stay on my feet for more than a minute in a real street brawl. It teaches you exactly how fast exhaustion sets in when you start grappling on the ground and it teaches how it’s almost impossible to defend against a hail of boots to the face. It might seem strange for me to say that such a huge proportion of this combat training is teaching me to just fucking run, but it’s that sort of mindset that might save my life.

The other half of the training is the discovery of physical limits.

Last night I lost fifteen fights in a row – and when I say “in a row,” I mean that as soon as I hit the ground, someone was pulling me to my feet and pushing me into the fists of my next opponent. Time enough between each fighter to catch a single breath, maybe two. I was shaking, stunned by repeated blows to the head. My chest ached from a high kick and my left eye was already purple and swollen. My legs were wet paper. Vomit pressed sour at the back of my throat. I couldn’t tell whether I was crying or whether it was sweat blurring my vision.

But I stood up anyway, ready to lose number sixteen. Because when it’s your life on the line, you fight until you’re physically unable to continue. You push back the fear and the voice at the back of your head whispering give up, give up, close your eyes, let it end. You bite down on the nausea and you force your bruised eyes open. Because I will not subject the people I love to a midnight visit from the police. I will not force them to watch me breathe through a tube with my face mashed and unrecognisable. I will not fail my friends, or myself.

You have to know how far you can go, and then you have to know you can push that bit further.

This is why I fight.

- – -

Fellow writers, there’s a metaphor in here. It’s not that subtle. I’m not in the mood for subtlety. Writing is as much a series of battles as any lifelong passion. You’re going to be rejected a thousand times before you get a sniff of success and you have to be prepared for that. Every rejection letter is a bruise. Some of them break the skin.

If you can’t keep going through the pain, quit now. Save yourself the time and effort. For all those others who are willing to weather the pain, the nausea, the sharp tang of blood, and get up again at the end and try again – we’re fighting side by side.

Love to all my friends.

Plot and story. What’s the difference? Is there a difference? Some would argue there is no real distinction between the two. Others, myself included, believe there’s a world of difference between a plot and a story.

Now, what I’m going to discuss here isn’t that much different from the same opinions put forward by Stephen King, David Morrell and Sol Stein, although I’m might be a little blunter in my explanation. I’m blunt because I feel I have to be to get the point across. Recognising the difference between plot and story is a fundamental skill for writers, especially when writing extended pieces (novels or novellas) and yet I keep seeing aspiring writers churning out hundreds of thousands of words of plot with very little story. Not just aspiring writers, but highly paid professionals as well (William Gibson, I’m looking at YOU).

A book with a well-crafted story will keep a reader’s attention even if afterwards they put it down and say “Man, that was shallow.” Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code is a good example. A book with a good plot but no story might sometimes keep us going until the end… but something will always feel intrinsically wrong, or lacking. Plot-heavy books are often the ones we give up on halfway through.

So what’s the difference?

A plot is a sequence of events. I like to imagine that this term actually arose from the mathematical process of plotting points on a graph.

Now, in real life, you often do things without reason. You pick up a wallet off the ground and decide to keep the money inside. You bet a grand on black at the roulette table on a whim. Humans are very unpredictable creatures, and even though there are almost certainly solid motivations behind these actions, they’re often buried so deep that we can’t recognise them as such. When someone asks you why you decided to drive at 200 km/hr through your local suburb, do you say “I watched a moto-GP on TV when I was five and the smell of the car air freshener reminded me of watching Bullit and I suddenly stamped on the accelerator”? Or do we shrug and say, “I dunno?”

Life is strange and unexpected. But when you put these sorts of inexplicable events in a book, they feels contrived and unbelievable. We expect more from our novelists. We expect everything to have a reason.

What is story? Story is the formula between the plot points. Or, another way of putting it: If the plot is a sequence of events, story is a sequence of cause and effect.

You’ll notice I’m using the film Titanic as an example. Now, I’ll never claim Titanic was a brilliant movie, but James Cameron does have a fair grasp on story. See that plot point, Invited to dinner? That’s the sort of thing many novelists have written down when they begin their planning. Kirk becomes Captain. Spaceship blows up. Spock marries Chekov. But putting all those things in a line doesn’t make a story. Imagine if, at the beginning of the voyage, Jack was just walking down the deck and Rose rushed up to him. “Boy, you’re handsome! Want to come to dinner with me and my fiance?” We’d think it was manufactured. What makes events believable is cause and effect. Decision and consequence.

Rose is depressed over her betrothal to a really awful guy. So she makes the decision to commit suicide. As a consequence, when she decides that living is actually a pretty rad thing to do, she can’t climb back over the rail. Jack is walking the deck at night. He sees Rose and makes the decision to save her, thereby earning her gratitude… and the ire of her fiance, Cal. We see this happening and even though it’s all a bit trite we can believe it because we have seen the characters making decisions, leading to consequences. Even the ICEBERG is subject to story. If, halfway through the movie, the ship just crashed and sank, we’d be sitting in the theatre saying “Damn, it’s a big iceberg! How’d you miss that one?” But we see the Captain demanding more speed from his engineers earlier in the movie in order to break a record (also see, Chekov’s Gun). Hitting the iceberg is a consequence of this. Thus, it doesn’t feel “plotted.”

This all might seem really obvious. You might be shaking your head right now, saying “okay, decisions and consequences, easy.” The problem is that many writers (maybe not most, but a fair proportion) begin with plot, not story. This isn’t bad in itself – having a strong plot is vital if novelists wants to keep readers interested. And, just as plot-centric novels usually feel artificial, story-centric novels can go too far and end up rambling as characters make endless decisions that, while interesting, don’t actually push the book any closer to a conclusion. For a prime example of what can go wrong when you write without plot, see any Stephen King novel of the past twenty years. King is a self-described “situation-based” author – he places characters in a bad situation with no idea of how they’ll get out, and lets their actions (and solutions) evolve organically. That’s all fine up until the point where the characters all end up splitting and doing their own thing, like watching TV, or buying a caravan – sure, it feels real, but it’s also boring as hell.

When you begin with plot, as I often do, you’ll have a series of events written down that you think can form an exciting story. One or two driving characters that fit this plot will already have come to mind, and you’ll start finding ways for them to progress between plot points that makes sense in the context of the character. Sometimes (often, in fact) those plot points will begin to shift and reform in ways that make them more character-based than plot based. For example, why have the final confrontation in an oil refinery when the main character is a chemist? Why should Dave have to crash his car if he’s a skilled driver? Plot is always shifting, and the more your plot adapts to character, action and consequence, the more real it will feel.

We hit crisis point when the writer becomes married to the plot.

Five reasonably intelligent characters are in a haunted house. Your plot outline dictates that one of those characters needs to go alone into the basement in order for the ghost of Vincent Price to eat him/her. But there is no goddamn way any of your characters would do that. The living room has a nice fireplace, comfy couches, and no ghosts. The basement is obviously a deathtrap. Nobody in their right mind would head down alone.

“But they have to,” the writer whines. “It’s in the plooooot.”

Screw the plot. This is where a writer has to make a choice between the characters and the outline. You insist on someone to go check out the basement? Fine. Do it. But be prepared for your readers to throw the book away in disgust. When the plot dictates the actions of the characters, we stop believing. Remember how everybody walked out of Transformers saying, “Wow, robot fights are cool, but why did they go back to the city? That was idiotic.” That’s a case of plot dictating story.

When your plot and your characters clash, and you can’t find any way of resolving the situation, the plot has to make way.

There are lots of ways to do this. The first step is to take that point on your scene plan and black it out. It’s gone. Deleted. Vamoosed. There is now a blank space waiting to be filled, and it’s going to be filled by your characters – by decision and consequence.

You can fill it by moving forwards through the story. Examine where your characters are, the situation and tools available to them, and then brainstorm what. Create a big list of possibilities based on your characters personalities and abilities. Any one of those possibilities, if it’s honest, is a valid continuation of the story. Some will be boring, and others will lead to dead ends. Weeding out the exciting developments from the bad out is your job.

The other option is to work backwards. If you’ve realised that there’s no way Miss Jones, famous claustrophobic ballet dancer, is going to go check out that haunted basement alone, but you know that for the story to progress she absolutely must die, jump ahead. Work on the following scene where the other characters find Jones drained of all her vital fluids, and continue the story from there. Then, hopefully, over the coming weeks, you’ll chance across the why. You’ll be able to go back and create a scene that doesn’t trample all over your characters motivations.

Remember – your characters aren’t steered by the plot. They steer the plot themselves. And when your series of dot-point events have finally mutated into a list of decisions and consequences by your protag and antagonists, you’ve got a story on your hands.

A final point – don’t lie to yourself. If you decide that Miss Jones is going into the damn basement whether she likes it or not, and your justification is that “she heard a spooky noise and decided to investigate”, your readers will catch you out. Always treat your readers as if they are smarter than you. If you ever think “will they notice?” the answer is always yes. Especially when it comes to your plot taking control.

In summary:
A plot is a series of events.
A story is a series of decisions and consequences that lead characters from one event to the next.
Plot events simply “happen” – characters are dragged from setpiece to setpiece.
Story events are a result of cause and effect, set in motion by either protagonists or antagonists.
A “plotted” book feels like a slideshow with characters as witnesses.
Story-driven books feel more organic and believable – characters behave as their personalities would dictate, and these behaviours lead to the set-pieces.
Always ask why things happen, and who is the cause.

- – -

For those who read all the way through – this is my very first how-to article on writing, and any feedback would be appreciated. I’m happy to continue modifying this article until it makes sense to everyone, so hit me up with your opinions. And good luck with the writing!

For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news.

How can you beat poet Roni Somek’s brief, lyrical weather report?

Summer is the pencil
that is least sharp
in the seasons’ pencil case.

Not much else from me lately. Alpha Slip passed the 50,000 word mark, and I finished university for the semester. My first how-to-write article will be finished soon. More at 11.

Best of luck to all those Aussie authors stuck in the winter doldrums!

If you’ve never heard of William Gibson, or read any of his stuff, shame on you. He is the premier bad-ass of sci-fi. You ever heard the term “cyber-space?”

Out in the malls and plazas, moths were batting themselves to death against the neon, but in Bobby’s loft the only light came from a monitor screen and the green and red LED’s on the face of the matrix simulator. I knew every chip in Bobby’s simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the “Cyberspace Seven,” but I’d rebuilt it so many times that you’d have had a hard time finding a square millimetre of factory circuitry in all that silicon.

William Gibson, Burning Chrome

That’s right. Gibson invented a term so awesome it became a buzzword for an entire generation. Then it became uncool, the sort of things politicians use when making arguments about banning game-violence, and that just goes to show how far he’s permeated tech culture.

His first novel, Neuromancer, is widely considered the birthplace of the cyber-punk movement. What’s more, it’s all about hacking, and Gibson wrote it without knowing anything about hacking at all. He just read about it and thought it was awesome. That’s like Jackie Chan, the cornerstone of modern cinematic martial arts, just turning up on the set of his first film saying “What, me fight? No, never tried it. Never practiced. But I read a book about it, how hard can it be?”

So if Gibson is such a bad-ass, why is his most recent novel such a let-down?

Let me just begin with a disclaimer – Spook Country isn’t a terrible novel. Even when Gibson is at his worst he’s still passable. I read the whole way through SC in a few days and was genuinely frantic about getting back into the book on my tram rides so I could know what happened next. There are some things it does very well. But all the good bits are wrapped in a tortilla of sloppy execution that has left me very, very sour. Gibson should know better, and that’s what hurts so much.

Spook Country is set right-about-now, and it’s all about secrets. Granted, most of Gibson’s novels are about secrets, but this time around it isn’t just a strong theme but the core of the macguffin. Spies from both sides of the cold-war divide vie for information that may or may not even be useful. You don’t know if it’ll help you until you hold it.

At the core of Spook Country is a three-way tug-of-war. The Old Man sits in the park, taking covert deliveries of iPods filled not with music but with strange data. He is tracking something important and possibly very valuable, but what? Brown is an agent from an unnamed government department. He’s watching the Old Man, trying to determine whether the Old Man knows where the special something is yet, and planning how best to arrest him. Finally, Hubertus Bigend is the head of a viral media company, and he’s watching everybody – trying to find out what the special something is, and whether he can exploit it for media gain.

Brown, Bigend, and the Old Man. Three intelligent, calculating, and flawed characters, all secretly watching the others. It has the makings of a great thriller.

Except Gibson doesn’t let us see their machinations, watch their plans from behind the scenes. He doesn’t allow us to know how they adapt when things go wrong. Instead he sticks us behind the eyes of three lackies. Dogsbodies. Hench-folk.

Hollis Henry is a wannabe journalist hired by Bigend to investigate some lackies of the Old Man. Tito is a Cuban immigrant hired by the Old Man to deliver the iPods. Milgrim is a translator kidnapped off the street by Brown to decipher SMS messages sent by Tito. These three characters aren’t flat or inherently uninteresting. It’s just that they have absolutely no influence on the story in any way.

Hollis goes wherever Bigend sends her. She makes no decisions of her own. She never solves any problems. When anything difficult comes up, Bigend solves it for her. Tito is the same. He only has to do two difficult things over the course of the novel, and both times he is given an extremely specific plan by the Old Man. So long as he follows the dots, everything works out. Milgrim is the worst. Literally a prisoner, he doesn’t even sleep until Brown allows him. He gets dragged around town performing translation duties – something that Brown could easily have phoned in to Babelfish, and then gets to sit in the car while Brown does all the interesting stuff.

Three side-characters that serve no function but as roaming viewpoints who get to show us the cool stuff from a distance, or by running errands that any hired-help could do. So we’re always one step behind the larger machinations, never quite understanding why anything just happened, simply accepting that things just are. It’s frustrating and fundamentally backwards. This is not the way stories should be, especially techno-thrillers.

As a result of not being shown any of the planning or behind-the-scenes magic you usually get in a political/scifi thriller, Spook Country feels very… thin. Hollis doesn’t need to figure out where the others have escaped to – she just gets handed a plane ticket. When Tito has to run, he is given turn-by-turn instructions and a free escape van. Milgrim… does nothing at all. So there’s a lot of filler. Milgrim is the worst offender – I think, at one point, he spent three consecutive chapters stoned, sitting on his bed, wishing he could be anywhere else.

To his credit, Gibson does his best to keep us interested. The language is always sharp and precise, some of his very best.

She was no longer certain why Jimmy had needed to borrow that much money in Paris, why she’d been willing to part with it, or how it was that she’d been able to lay her hands on cash.
She’d given it to him in francs. It had been that long ago.
The water was deep enough that is rose along the sides of her face as she settled the back of her head against the bottom of the tub. A child-sized island of face above water. Isla de Hollis…
…She raised her sunken head partially out of the water and began to work shampoo into her hair. “Jimmy,” she said, “you really piss me off. The world is already weirder and stupider than you could ever have guessed.” She lowered her shampooed hair back into the water. The bathroom kept on filling with the absence of her dead friend, and she’d started to cry before she could start to rinse.

This is in sharp contrast to his early dialogue, when he had a terrible tendency to mix metaphors until nothing made sense:

He rose in my mind like a cheap religious hologram, glowing, the enlarged chip on his shirt looming like a reconnaissance shot of some doomed urban nucleus.

William Gibson, Johnny Mnemonic

Even so, language won’t sustain a whole novel. Gibson also uses and abuses extremely short chapters. The longest would be about ten pages and the shortest two. Sometimes this works, but often it feels artificial. You hit a twenty page section of nothing and, instead of deleting it and writing something else, Gibson breaks that section into 5 chapters of 4 pages each, spread out between the three narrators. The twenty pages flies by and you’re left staring, unsure of what just happened or why.

The real shame in all this is that Spook Country is a damn fine premise for a novel. The smaller character twists set against the larger arc of the Old Man’s cat-and-mouse game with Brown are well crafted and exciting. Hollis Henry, as the introductory POV character, is interesting and sympathetic. When the macguffin is revealed it’s a little bit of a letdown, but also somehow very plausible. I didn’t even subtract points for Gibson’s abuse of parkour (a standing backflip over a speeding car? That just pushes through “cool” into the land of “ridiculous”).

It’s just such a let-down that the POV characters are so disconnected from proceedings. It’s a case of right plot, wrong story – or even right plot, no story. This is spaghetti and meatballs with no meatballs and no cheese. Basically filling, but with no real personal touches and nothing to bind the meal together.

I don’t regret buying Spook Country, but I won’t be reading it again. No thumbs up, no thumbs down. Let’s hope the finale in Gibson’s Pattern Recognition trilogy is a return to form.