All the Ways My Novel Sucks
Tearing myself a new one... Thoughts on dystopia, character arcs, theme, allegory, jargon, and the bets I've placed.
We’re fast approaching the two-thirds mark in the telling of Quibble. Very soon, many characters — Quibble, of course, but also Alnasl, Definition, Bibliography, Rasalased, Vega, Aladfar, Asuja, Lesath — will begin to face stark choices, commitments to fate.
And you’ll face one, too, dear reader — at least, if you’re a free subscriber to Singular Dream. Chapter 54, “Between,” will be the last chapter provided in full for free. If you want to read the rest of the novel, you’ll need to go in for a paid subscription.1
So, this seems to be a good moment for a little compendium of things I’ve wanted to tell you about Quibble. I’ve been compiling this post for several weeks, working from what I discarded while writing other reflections. It recounts many reasons I’ve had for misgivings, hence the title, but it’s also a manifesto of faith.
In what do I have faith? In you, dear reader. So this reflection is wholly free to read.
As mentioned in “Productive Mysteries,” late last year the writer
published my critique of the opening chapters of his novel Becoming P.T. Lyfantod. In a preface, Jeremy wrote:This story has been queried and rejected by essentially all of the agents in traditional publishing that rep fantasy. I think the way I started the story has probably got a lot to do with why. But maybe that just means that the traditional publishing model is resistant to challenging works.
As Jeremy knew, I went down the same road with the same lack of success. I queried a lot of literary agents after finishing two quite different versions of Quibble. My queries never landed with anyone. One agent did ask for a full read of the manuscript, but her rejection followed. All the other agents — hundreds — rejected my query out of hand.
Why all the rejections? Probably, as with Becoming P.T. Lyfantod, it was about how my novel begins. Quibble asks a lot of the reader, going in.
Now it’s my turn to be critiqued!
has written a reaction — I’m not sure I’d call it a “review” — to the first chapter of Quibble.
What Derek wrote is short enough that I’ll quote it in full:
Hey, fellow “Numberless,” do you fancy a surreal dive into being born emo? After reading Quibble, I’m burning with so much angst it’s like someone hacked my old Tumblr account and plastered it with all the baby pictures from my mom’s album of me.
This story is about the eponymous Quibble, a newborn “One” who’s basically the ultimate emo teen from the second she’s born — crying, over-analyzing her entire life, and knee-jerk rebelling against society (does the “Consensus” host a Hot Topic?). The world-building is — excuse me for this descriptor — surreally real. With each gluttonous spin of the mouse wheel, this chapter sprayed my face with aerosolized DMT mixed with glitter and existential dread. I’m not crying, you’re crying. It’s like that one time when I found a band nobody’s heard of but it became my entire personality for a month!
The world of the “Ones” is like if your high school clique was a cult, but make it intergalactic and digital and … wet. Quibble’s born “Within,” a dark, damp place where everyone’s doing their brief “alive” thing before they formally enter a creepy digital gestalt. I could practically smell the amniotic fluid and hear the echo of a thousand voices chanting “Quibble!” like some cursed cheerleading squad. “Unity” runs brainwashing lessons in the womb, and names like Quiddity and Quandary sound like they were chosen by throwing darts at my 6th period philosophy professor’s whiteboard. If I’d been born knowing how to spell, I might hate my name too — never mind, I hate it regardless! Quibble’s world might be in the distant future, but it’s still the kind of place where, if it were me, I’d scribble angsty poetry in a notebook only to burn it because nobody gets me.
Imagine being born awake and aware of what’s happening to you. I could almost hear Unity’s womb-lectures on spelling and conformity (ugh, getting homework before you’re even born!). I’m weeping sympathy tears into my metaphorical studded wristbands — one second [Quibble is] chilling in mama’s womb, the next she’s being passed around like a hot potato in a room full of strangers already calling her “willful.” Man, what did she get herself into? She never asked to be born, okay? I feel this pain! It’s like showing up to a big family Thanksgiving and realizing no one you’re related to is cool, that you’re the only person with an actual life to live. “Unity” hates willful kids and calls her precocious — give me a break, she’s five minutes old! Quibble’s been robbed of her cute and carefree baby days, instead born straight into her misunderstood teenage years.
What beautiful snark! I roared with laughter, reading that. Seeing someone having so much fun with living the story — and sort of tearing it a new one with such stylistic panache and humor — is so much better than getting it workshopped!
Derek assured me that in fact he liked reading Quibble. But since I’m a navel-gazing, self-serious pedant, I decided to incorporate some of my thoughts on his reaction into this reflection. Let me preface this, however, by saying I’m not writing in an effort to defend my work. As I said once before:
I am firmly of the belief that writing shouldn’t need apologia. It either succeeds on its own merits or fails by its lack of them. And if it fails, no mere argument can rescue it from that.
As in all my reflections, here I’m just thinking some things through.
Dystopia’s Heavy Hand
Kicking off a novel is tricky business. I think it’s especially tricky for dystopia. If you don’t signal it’s dystopia and telegraph your themes pretty loudly, readers may have trouble latching onto them. At the same time, you have to establish a protagonist who glosses the themes and offers somewhere to go with them.
The classic example is Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the first sentence, the clocks strike thirteen — this isn’t the world we know, with twelve-hour clocks. Stinking apartment hallways, a broken elevator, Hate Week, and “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” all show up in the second paragraph. By the end of the first chapter, Winston Smith has committed very serious thoughtcrimes. The greatest is writing “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” over and over in his contraband journal.
From the get-go, George Orwell wants his readers to be in no doubt about the shape of this world and, within it, who Winston is — a thoughtcriminal, yes, but not only that. He doesn’t slink off to a faraway hidey-hole to write his heresy. He does it in his apartment, just out of sight of the state’s eavesdropping telescreen, as if he wants the Ministry of Love to wonder where he is and send the Thought Police to find out what he’s doing. Winston is a rebel practically daring the authorities to catch him. Breaking the law by thinking privately and independently isn’t enough. Really, he wants to meet Big Brother and have the showdown. That’s the premise for his whole sad tale.
I followed Orwell down this road. Its risk is bashing readers over the head with what you’re up to, making them roll their eyes and say, “Aw, come on!” But if you can make it just realistic enough, maybe you can get them to buy into a game with a big ante.
In Quibble, the challenge was that Within is a basically unrealistic world. So I'm very pleased that Derek found the world-building “surreally real.”2
Quibble, the Lady of Angst
Yeah, Quibble is “emo” straight out of the womb. That’s kind of the point about her in the first six chapters. In the first, some pretty heavy shit — being assigned personality traits that may spell trouble, thinking “heretically” and being afraid of it, meeting her parents only to be snatched away from them — is being meted out to a kid who is way too immature for it all. How well would you cope?
Quibble goes on being too immature for the hand dealt to her until a third of the way through her story, when Meissa finally gives her the dressing-down she needs. Even after that, it’s still a hard, steep road up out of hell.
I wasn’t conscious of it when I first wrote “Birth,” but the character arc it sets Quibble up for swims against a strong current in today’s genre fiction.
In Greek myth, the goddess of wisdom Athena was said to have sprung fully formed and mature from the forehead of her father Zeus. As a metaphor, that’s more or less apt for where many writers nowadays start a protagonist off. Especially with heroines who are supposed to be “boss girls” or some other anti-traditional archetype, there’s a tendency to write them from the first word as totally mature, totally in control, totally up for it — no matter what “it” is. Often, we get the Unrealistically Smart Mega-Brain Who Never Fucks Up or the Unrealistically Overpowered Heroine Who’s Gonna Own Your Butt. Either way, I don’t believe in these characters’ reality.3
I believe in characters who do fuck up and who do get owned themselves, because that is human. I dislike flat character arcs, hardly “arcs” at all. I’m disappointed if all I get out of a character’s journey — especially the protagonist’s! — is one self-realization or, worse yet, only a smattering of tiny, overly subtle, thematically thin changes of heart.
I want characters who noticeably grow. I want the growth to mean something. At the story’s end, I don't want to be left scratching my head over what the hell the point of it was. If the heroine turns out to be a bad-ass boss girl, then cool, but I want that to be a role she struggles to step into — because I damn well know I’d struggle!
I believe the reason I’m so impatient with relatively flat arcs, now so pervasive, is that they tip me off to a lack of thematic ambition. These characters don’t have very much of anywhere to go because their stories aren’t about very much.4
I’m not speaking of the sophistication or profundity of a theme. You can find insights and do wonders with a simple theme, e.g. human kindness. I’m talking about the mere presence of a theme — real, meaningful substance to hang the story on!
In my MFA program, we used to ask, “Why does this poem need to exist?” Well, when I see flat arcs and vapid themes, I wonder, “Why does this story need to be told?”
Where arcs and theme are lacking, I think, the authors aren’t putting their characters through the meat grinder because they’re afraid of putting readers through the meat grinder. It’s safer to ante up the bare minimum and just make readers feel “cozy.”
Maybe in Quibble — this novel being my first — I over-corrected for the flat-arc trend and started my heroine off too immature, giving her too much runway for growth. On the other hand, the novel is a behemoth. Without a lot of runway, Quibble could grow really stale as a character.
As I rewrote Quibble wholesale in the fifth draft, I decided it was smarter to err on the side of the former problem than the latter. All the prior drafts had suffered from story stagnation, and now I thought I was better off with an exasperating protagonist and a story than with a “perfect” protagonist and virtually no story.
Allegory in Quibble
The dream of the pitch-black cavern and the facelessness of its denizens launched me into Quibble, but in my first draft I didn’t show it. I called the Ones’ habitat “Alabaster Chambers” — a too-sly nod to Emily Dickinson. I made it visible for Quibble and her companions, and thus for the reader. But one facet of the dream became a permanent fixture, as I said in “Social Media Made Me an Asshole”:
Yet from draft to draft, in all the iterations of Quibble’s world, one thing about the world-building remained constant: Ones couldn’t see each other. Always, they lived at least one sensory step removed from our understanding of human embodiment.
What surprises me is that I stuck with the initial idea of a far-future dystopia and even set it in the farther future when I wrote the fifth draft. The trick to this was setting the real action Without, in the light, and making Without a picture — several pictures — of the past. The nomadic Far herd livestock and live an Iron Age, close-to-the-earth existence. At the monastery, the monkish, distracted Dazed engage in agriculture. An industrial revolution is getting afoot among the Adroit.
Still, the novel relies a lot on metaphor. For instance, even for an Adroit like Nish, the Zeros’ faces are blank, their expressions muted, their feelings hard to discern. That’s a corollary to Within, the Zeros’ natural environment. It’s Within seen Without.
Quibble is an allegory. As far as my reading has gone, this allegory, all told, amounts to maybe the only really original thing I’ve got to contribute to science fiction.
Fantastical magic in sci-fi is nothing new. Neither are the unintended consequences of runaway tech. Dystopian cyberpunk takes stock of tech’s potential for getting out of hand and wreaking havoc on Earth and the human race all the time. And then there’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, a novel which brilliantly explores questions about tech by transposing them to medieval settings with people made technophobic by living with the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.5
But in my reading, even dystopian sci-fi often treats futuristic tech largely as a great leap forward. Placed in the right hands, the thinking goes, this tech inevitably puts us more in touch with ourselves. The idea of the Singularity as a humanistic regression — a loss of the capacities for self-reflection and empathy and kindness which, I believe, form the basis for a shared essential humanity — has lain mostly ignored.6 A story about someone struggling, outwardly and inwardly, against a regression of this sort has not yet been told, at least as far as I’m aware.
So I’m telling it.7
Jargon in Quibble
One criticism I’ve heard from readers has to do with terminology. Instead of inventing new words for futuristic technologies — the common method in sci-fi — Quibble uses known words like glass and orb and Egg to signify them. (So far, readers have seen just a few invented words, such as iso and micro.) The novel attempts to build a poetry out of ordinary words and make that poetry work within its style.
This toying with language is a big part of writing for me, but it can be overindulged in fiction and end up working against a story.
Ironically, this is the reason for my nit with invented words. When I see them in sci-fi, often I feel the writer put more thought into clever wordplay than describing a thing, saying what it does, and narrating the characters’ experiences of it. Cool names for futuristic gadgets become stand-ins for useful information. This practice irritates me as much as its opposite, “technobabble,” which deluges you with technical jargon, in many cases used quite inaccurately to put a veneer of “science” on the implausible.
I think both practices occur because many sci-fi writers are in love with technology in itself. I’m much more interested in our culture of tech, the social attitudes which steer how we use it and relate to it. How might tech change the human experience and what it is to be human? That’s what I write about. Except insofar as the technicalities affect answers to this question, they’re distractions. They don’t interest me.
So I let them go. I opted instead to work with allegory and metaphor, and to give them roles in the plot (so they aren’t mere window-dressing), I made up a magic system, just as if I was writing a fantasy novel. In Quibble’s world, all the futuristic technology is, by our standards, magical.8
Quibble has its own species of jargon, of which it makes frequent use, but except when describing the Egg, it lacks the scientific and technical jargon of many sci-fi novels. It bets on some readers yearning, as I do, for sci-fi with a poetic style. It also bets that its poetic touches will serve its interrogations of emerging and imagined technology, that they will uniquely serve these interrogations.
Afterword
Do any of my many bets pay off?
They haven’t with literary agents! Of course, those folks may be right. Quibble may be badly written for what it is, and I may be unable to see or admit that. Readers may not want this sort of book. I may have wasted a lot of time — ten years of my writing life.
All the same, I’m committed to making Quibble what I really believe it can be. I don’t think acquiescing to literary agents’ beliefs about publishing’s market forces will get it there. That’s why I came here to publish it.
I don’t think literary agents and publishing companies get the final say. Readers do. If I’m wrong, the book’s readers can tell me.
rem
One is welcome to comment.
I plan to offer you a discount. But why put paywalls in the remaining chapters? Well, I am a working writer. I deserve compensation for my work. Once all free chapters are published, a body of roughly 122,000 words will be available, free, to anyone who wants to read it. That’s longer than most novels published now, even many in the fantasy genre. I believe I’ve come through, and then some, on my initial promise to my free subscribers. Now, it’s up to you to decide what reading this story to the end is worth to you.
I may reflect sometime on what Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Handmaid’s Tale taught me about dystopian world-building in particular.
A similarly absurd trope is writing the heroine as One of the Guys, Bro. All too often, this is immature male fantasy, as silly as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Lay off the archetypes, guys. Spend time in your characters’ heads, think about what they value and what they’re willing to sacrifice, and focus on writing them as people. Nine-tenths of the time, their gender is of little real concern.
No, I’m not naming names — I don’t want to be “that guy” who craps on other writers as if he thinks that gets him anywhere. But I’ll cite a counterexample: The Hobbit. Tolkien gave Bilbo Baggins an incredible character arc which perfectly serves themes of self-discovery and awakening the dormant heroism within oneself.
If Quibble is cybermonk — a subgenre moniker I devised for its place within sci-fi — then I suppose A Canticle for Leibowitz is proto-cybermonk.
But I’ll mention, once again, Accelerando by Charles Stross.
This is probably the most egotistical claim I’ve made about my writing on Singular Dream. It smacks of an ambition very likely out of proportion to my abilities. But then, what writer ever achieved anything by keeping his ambitions proportionate to his current abilities?
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” —Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible, rev. 1973.
Don't stop. The demand for solipsism and poetic prose in sci-fi is heavily underutilized. It can break the fourth wall and rapidly shift the readers mood pallette.
Perhaps introduce passages of lucidity and open with one to prime the reader.
The self interrogation is sharp, but what shines through is a real belief in the story’s weird, ambitious soul. You’ve genuinely made me want to read it.