A holiday story of sorts.
Monthly Archives: December 2013
Midwinter
In the first shining moment he saw the whole strange-familiar world, glistening white; the roofs of the outbuildings mounded into square towers of snow, and beyond them all the fields and hedges buried, merged into one great flat expanse, unbroken white to the horizon’s brim. Will drew in a long, happy breath, silently rejoicing. Then, very faintly, he heard the music again, the same phrase. He swung round vainly searching for it in the air, as if he might see it somewhere like a flickering light.
—The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper, Chapter 1: “Midwinter Day”
Midwinter’s Eve has always meant more to me than Midwinter’s Day. Especially at this time of year, I focus on the shadow rather than the light. But, especially at this time of year, it is important to remind myself that the light does return.
May tomorrow dawn clear and bright.
Plot and Meaningful Choice
I don’t talk much about how I’m submitting stories to magazines here, because I don’t find it very interesting as a reader. I got a personal rejection letter this week which has rearranged how I am looking at the conventional arc plot, and plot in general, though, so I want to leave it here for further reflection.
The letter said, in part:
[The story] devoted much more time to explaining the worldbuilding than to constructing a conflict in which the characters had to make choices.
I had been thinking of plot in a sort of good-versus-evil, Hero’s Journey kind of context, which I don’t like, and feeling very bound by the idea that the character needs to change in some way. Saying that “the character needs to change” phrases it in the character’s passive voice, though — the author changes the character by manipulating them like a puppet through the action of the narrative, which as a reader I always find very flat.
Saying “the character needs to make choices” phrases it actively for the character, and makes it the author’s job to use the narrative to construct an environment in which the character needs to make choices, which I like. I think I know how to do that.
So that idea has reduced my anxiety about plotting, maybe enough that I know how one or two of these stories go.
It also idea lined up nicely with this bit, from Rules of Play
Playing a game means making choices and taking actions. All of this activity occurs within a game-system designed to support meaningful kinds of choice-making.
That is an interesting symmetry, which I had not noticed before.
At first I thought John Brunner’s The Squares of the City
Anyhow, I don’t know what it means. But it will bear thinking on.
Snow
It’s snowing in Boston, great gauze curtains of snow. Except for the regular heartbeat of the snowplow, it’s eerily quiet, like the house has been swaddled in cloth. Everyone is huddled inside.
Stay warm, stay dry.
“All of his selves and words and decisions were an enactment of the enduring nation he meant to live in some day.”
His improvisations were far more gifted than most, in part because of his disciplined approach to political selfhood. That’s the thing that made Mandela’s strategy and his adaptations stand out. All of his selves and words and decisions were an enactment of the enduring nation he meant to live in some day. I think that is the difference between him and many of his nationalist contemporaries who ascended to power in newly independent African states between 1960 and 1990. (This, too, needs remembering today: Mandela came to nationalism in the same historical moment as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Patrice Lumumba, Kenneth Kaunda, and so on.) The difference is that Mandela was always looking through the struggle to its ultimate ends, whereas most of the nationalists could see little further than the retreat of the colonial powers from the continent and the defeat of any local political rivals.
From “Be Nelson Mandela”, h/t Making Light.