The Guardian has a good article on creating characters, although as usual with the Guardian, I’m left with the sinking feeling that I’m not at all well read, that I never will be well read, and furthermore that literacy is completely wasted on me. Luckily, there are some excellent and contradictory ideas about what makes a good character, along with examples for philistines like me. Here’s the bit that I want to focus on:

“There is nothing harder than the creation of fictional character. I can tell it from the number of apprentice novels I read that begin with descriptions of photographs. You know the style: ‘My mother is squinting in the fierce sunlight and holding, for some reason, a dead pheasant. She is dressed in old-fashioned lace-up boots, and white gloves. She looks absolutely miserable…’

The unpractised novelist cleaves to the static, because it is much easier to describe than the mobile: it is getting these people out of the aspic of arrest and mobilised in a scene that is hard…”

I’ve read a lot of essays and manuals on writing that advocate for a sort of ‘twenty questions’ approach, but is it really effective?

Ford Madox Ford writes wonderfully about getting a character up and running - what he calls “getting a character in”. Ford and his friend Joseph Conrad loved a sentence from a Guy de Maupassant story: ‘He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway.’ Ford comments: “that gentleman is so sufficiently got in that you need no more of him to understand how he will act. He has been ‘got in’ and can get to work at once.”

The article goes on to examine the different ways that various writers prove and disprove various rules of characterization, the nature of characters, the limitations of fiction, the strengths of same–it’s well worth the read. I’ll leave you with a final quote that speaks to the ‘getting in’ of characters and just about everything else that can be said aesthetically about fiction:

I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or “deep” enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions.

Litfarm assignment: what are your novel’s (or short story’s, or novella’s) conventions?

So says Clive Thompson in Wired this month. What’s his problem with contemporary literary fiction?

“After I’d read my 189th novel about someone living in a city, working in a basically realistic job and having a realistic relationship and a realistically fraught family, I was like, ‘OK. Cool. I see how today’s world works.’ I also started to feel like I’d been reading the same book over and over again.”

So why doesn’t sf (he uses the deprecated term “sci-fi”) get any respect? Because so many of the authors are terrible writers. And it’s hard not to agree with him. Thinking of writing some sf? You’re in good company lately: Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Susanna Clarke, and Margaret Atwood, to name a few.

Symphony Space recently announced the 2008 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. Entries will be judged by a master of the form, Amy Hempel, and the winner will have his story read as part of the Selected Shorts performance at Symphony Space on May 21, 2008 and receive $1000. The reading will also be recorded for possible broadcast on PRI.

The story must address the question, Are We There Yet? The deadline is March 14, 2008.

Let me know if you enter, and good luck.

I love etymology. Whether it’s shattering the dreams of a co-worker who named his baby “mark” in the hope his son would leave the same on the world (the name is from the latin Marcius, from Mars, the God of War) or puzzling out the mysterious “mommixity” (possibly from French mommuck, to annoy) from Birds Without Wings, I dig them words.

Here’s a recent book for fans of the weird word, The Dord, The Diglot and an Avocado or Two, by Anu Garg. (Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

If you’re like me a few minutes ago, you’re wondering who Steven Poole is. He’s a blogger and the author of Trigger Happy, a non-fiction book on the aesthetics of video games. Anyway. He blogged about the Kindle and after the subsequent fooferaw, has decided to experiment with ebooks by giving his book away as a free PDF for a while.

I haven’t read the book, but here on the litfarm we’re intrigued by authors giving away free, electronic versions of their books, in the hopes it’ll translate into dead-tree sales. Or at least a little bit more glory.

So check it out. If you like it, why not pick up a copy? Or not. That’s ebooks for you.

Let’s get things rolling with a call for submissions from EDGE and Tesseract Books, leading Canadian publisher of science fiction and fantasy. What’s interesting here is the genres they’re looking for (italics mine).

“all the genres of imaginative literature, including but not limited to magic realism, science fiction, fantasy, dark fantasy, slipstream, supernatural horror, weird tales, alternate history, space opera, planetary adventure, surrealism, superheroes, mythic fantasy, etc.”

Highlights from the submission guidelines:

• The anthology is open to Canadians, landed immigrants, long-time residents, and expatriates.
• 10-20k words
• Email submissions only
• Deadline Feb 8, 2008 Feb 1, 2008 (they edited the page at some point after I reported this!)

Winners receive $200-300 (sliding scale) and publication in Tesseracts 12. Here’s a link to last year’s anthology, edited by one of my favorite sf authors and web celebrities, Cory Doctorow.

Hi folks! Welcome to litfarm, a blog about writing and publishing in Canada (and other North American countries). We’re especially for writers who are just getting started in their careers, but we aim to cast a wide net.

And we’ve got a thing for goats.

If you’ve got a link to an article you think might interest us, send an email to litfarm at gmail dot com. Be sure to include your nickname and personal site for proper attribution!