4th Street Fantasy Notes - The Chewy Bits

[marydell]

The Chewy Bits

• I'm not using any reasonable standard for last/first/abbreviated names, just going with what works for me. Apologies if anyone doesn't like being called whatever I'm using. 
• "Audience" means someone in the audience whose name I don't know.
• "Someone" means I don't know or didn't manage to note who was speaking, but generally this is a panelist, not an audience member.  If it's you or you know who it is, please let me know and I'll fix the attribution.
• Text not in quotes is me paraphrasing; text in quotes is exactly as I heard it.
• Text in brackets is me.

Panelists:

Teresa Nielsen Hayden - mod [

tnh]
Steven Brust [skzb]
Emma Bull [coffeeem]
Pamela Dean [pameladean]
Jim Frenkel [no LJ or current blog! Shocking! Here's a link to an interview: http://www.abc.net.au/news/arts/articulate/200605/s1651668.htm]
[Kevin Maroney was listed as a panelist but IIRC was not there...]

 

Favorite Quotes:

Teresa Nielsen Hayden:  Gene Wolfe writes books where the basic unit of construction is the trap door.
Harriet Culver: Tolkien is the ultimate sourdough bread starter of chewy bits for fantasy.

Works & Authors Referenced:

Spenser books 2 thru 6, Robert B. Parker
Aubrey/Maturin books, Patrick O'Brian
J.R.R. Tolkien
John M. Ford
Bone Dance, Emma Bull
Stardance, Spider Robinson
Gene Wolfe
Joss Whedon
Jim Macdonald
Alfred Bester
Moby Dick
The Time Machine
Ellis Peters (Cadfael mysteries)
P.D. James (Dalgliesh, Cordelia Grey).
The Infinity Link, Jeff Carver
Catspaw, Joan Vinge
Keith Giffen (Comics creator)

Terms:

Loam of Myth
Chewy Bits
Narrative Lust
Twee
Sturgeon's Law

 

____________________________

Brust:  Emma, what did you mean when you said the chewy bits?

Bull:  Steve has a surprisingly good memory for having the [inaudible comment about his lifestyle].

Bull: When I used the phrase the chewy bits, I meant when you get to a point in the narrative where you’re challenged, you’re running as hard as you can--when you as a reader get the feeling that you and the writer are making the story happen together--when the story is way more nutritious than I’m used to.

TNH: The moment at which the reader becomes conscious that the author and the reader make the story together.

Bull: It’s a lot like theories of memory...

Brust:  Remembering many happy hours talking about books...the second through the sixth of Robert B. Parker's Spenser books, you can read in two hours and argue about for two weeks.  What you're arguing about are the chewy bits.

Frenkel: Not the wow moment, but the pre-wow moment.

Bull: The chewy bits are the stuff that set you up for the effect of the climax. You’re getting stuff in subtext that’s important but you don’t realize it until later.

Dean: Mike Ford’s work is almost entirely chewy bits, there’s nothing else there.  All that stuff you don’t see on the first read-through when narrative lust is driving you.

Dean:  [Says a term came from Usenet--probably "narrative lust," but I'm not sure]

TNH:   Odds are it came out fanfic if it’s a good critical term.

Brust: How do you put those in?  Chewy means you can spend some time masticating them.

[Someone]: What’s your trick, Steve?

Brust: My trick is to be asking myself a question and use the book to work out the answer when I don’t know the answer. That keeps me honest.  What are some other ways?

Audience:  What is the relationship between structure and chewy bits?

Frenkel: Do you do them as you’re going along, or do you put them in when you go back?

Brust:  They’re integral. 

TNH:  If you stick the chewy bits in afterwards you have to do at least one major rewrite.

Bull:  You can’t put them in later--that’s ornamentation, not substance.

Frenkel:  That’s not true. You’re saying two things at once.  Sometimes you don’t realize what you’ve got until you get through, and then you realize it and so then you have to go back and make sure it works on different levels.

Brust:  A good example is Bone Dance by Emma.  It says, “If you’re not doing something you’re passionate about, why are you doing it?  And maybe there’s someone who can do it better.” But the whole book is building to that.  A counterexample is Stardance [I think?] by Spider Robinson. The whole book was building to a question, "and then the characters all looked at each other, gave each other the answer, and I threw the book across the room."  Doing it right means there is something to chew on.

Audience:  Do you know what the question is to begin with, or do you zero in on it as you’re writing?

Bull: “The answer to your question is yes.” Sometimes you know, sometimes not.  Sometimes you fool yourself that you’re just writing about a character but your hindbrain is working on something.

TNH asks for examples of different writers who do things differently.

Lenny Bailes:  I wish we had Gene Wolfe here to find out whether he’s doing a deliberate dance–I think he must be doing something deliberately.  Severian being Christ, that must have been planted.

TNH:  Another thing authors can do–-Brust, Wolfe, Whedon, Jim Macdonald--which is you start out and you make myriad of moves, you open up the plot in ways that are going to be interesting and have lots of room for play and fit together well. You provide yourself lots of material and toys and as the narrative develops you can pick stuff later as it occurs to you.

Chip:  Question about "collecting chewy bits--Bester did this”

Frenkel: It depends on who's doing it. Some are more conscious and some are more intuitive.  I worked with Jeff Carver on “The Infinity Link.” It started off as kind of a regular short novel about a woman who got stuck into a computer by accident, and it ended up being an enormous multilayered novel about first contact.  I said “there’s a lot more in this story" and he said “there is.” Jeff Carver, Joan Vinge.

TNH mentions comics writer Keith Geffen.

Frenkel:  Beth Meacham read an early draft of Catspaw. Tor didn’t publish it. I said she’s not halfway there. Patrick copyedited it. It's a great book–it took 5 drafts to realize all the chewy bits. Not everybody has the chewy bits, and some readers really prefer not having chewy bits to worry about because it makes their brains hurt.

Bull: The "Loam of myth” is what these bits grow out of . You lay down layers in your brain – layers of myth, images, other people’s stories. You start pulling metaphor and imagery from these things. For instance, trickster and coyote images. You keep coming back to images of dogs and coyotes, and then you notice that you’re doing it, so you reinforce it.

[Someone]: What's Teresa's first law?

TNH:  Plot is literary convention, story is a force of nature. 

Dean: Writers have a store of images—anyone raised in this culture will have images that will come out. There you will be with your Christian images and you’ll be saying “I’m a Goddamn atheist!” but there they will be.

Brust: Is narrative voice also an image, doing the same job?

TNH: Voice also mediates all the other information – it does a lot of things at once. 

Bull:  But that’s part of how it does it – it draws from the reader’s store of images.

Audience:  It feels like the function of the chewy bits is like what happens between the panels in a comic book –the spaces.

TNH invokes Moby Dick, specifically the whaling stuff.

Shetterly:  Moby Dick…I was thinking about The Time Machine, the chewy/cool stuff is this tiny little bit framed by the story in The Time Machine. There are chewy bits, lumpy bits, and pureed bits. Moby Dick is a fine example of chewy bits vs. lumpy bits.

Audience: Which are the cool parts of The Time Machine?

Shetterly: The future with the Eloi and the Moorlocks.

Bear: “In the future, Goths eat Hippies!”

Shetterly: “So, to finish a digression…”

(TNH falls onto the table laughing)

Shetterly: …what Hollywood does is take out the chewy bits.

Audience: We’re talking about SF as having a lot more depth than most genre literature or than most literature, period.  

[Someone:]  Literary fiction is a genre.

Someone speaks of Moby Dick as high culture, and someone else counters that it wasn't; it was popular fiction.  

TNH: "If Moby Dick had been high culture it would not have been a novel."

Bull:  There are still books in SF and fantasy that are [simply] about what they’re about.  And chewy bits can be found in other genres--I find them in mystery, in literary genre fiction.

Someone asks for examples of chewy mysteries and people toss out Ellis Peters (Cadfael mysteries) and P.D. James (Dalgliesh, Cordelia Grey).

Frenkel:  Sturgeon’s law applies to everything, as Sturgeon pointed out. 90 percent of everything is crap. Genres are artificial barriers.

[Someone]: SF and fantasy are coming to inform more and more genres.

Bull: Interstitial fiction, crossover fiction…cross-genre pollination is where the really exciting stuff happens in fiction in the 21st century.

Brust: SF is one of the marketing categories where you are required by the conventions of the category to tell a story, but you are also free to do more than tell the story. This is also true of mystery and sometimes of romance.

TNH: (agreeing) “There’s a very broad spread in romances these days.” [Much laughter from the audience as TNH looks around, mystified, then catches on.] “I have a clean mind, that’s why I can say that with a straight face”

Brust:  Patrick O'Brian is full of chewy bits.  There's stuff about medical technology, rants against authority...You have Jack, who’s a big dumb mindless galoot, except he isn’t at all. O'Brian's exploring the complexity of the human personality.

Bull: The experience of unknown technologies, the phenomenon of first contact – the whole idea of encountering the other comes up over and over in the Aubrey-Maturin books.  Starting with Aubrey and Maturin first encountering each other. 

Brust: There’s nothing in O'Brian that’s not doing triple duty.

Audience/ Priscilla:  "Are there different grains of chewiness?"

Audience/Jeff:  "It’s like literary tapioca.”

Audience:  Have you ever needed to excise the chewy bits to make the story

better?

Frenkel: If it doesn’t work with the other stuff, it's not a good chewy bit.

TNH: If a book sells a lot of copies, you can sometimes put together a collection of chewy bits that were taken out. You can sometimes see where something is missing in a book – if there’s a large chewy bit in the vicinity of something it’ll shift all the language around it – like you can see that the magnetic poles shifted in history because there are traces in the rocks. Sometimes you can see a place in a book where a chewy bit has been taken out, and they think they’ve smoothed over but you can see that something was there.

Audience:  Can you give an example?

TNH:  “Not very tactfully.”

Brust:  There was a time where I was writing about a sword.  Adding an adjective to the sword made it a symbol; with not enough adjectives, it was just a sword. Two adjectives made it a heavy-handed symbol.

Audience (Ben Yalow, I think):  Excising chewy bits is a different way of looking at a story.  You can look at a story as a restriction set.  You have a loam that consists of the entire set of stories that could possibly be told. When you take out or put in a chewy bit you’re picking what you’re excluding from the set. 

Bull:  Yes

Brust:  Go to the head of the class.  Some stories are more like growing a rose bush and then pruning the parts that make it a less beautiful rose bush.

Audience:  Like Tom Bombadil being left out of the movies.  He left it out because it doesn’t have to do with the big plot.

Pamela Dean:  [*facepalm*]

[Someone (maybe Pamela still)]:  Tom Bombadil is many people’s favorite bit.

Bull: Once you shovel through all the twee in the Tom Bombadil part you have another clue to the nature of the ring and the nature of Middle Earth, so that’s an important bit.

[Someone]:  What's "twee?"

TNH:  Cutesy,  whimsical.  Elfy welfy stuff.

Brust: Like the stuff I write is twee.

Frenkel: There’s a lot more going on in your head when your read the book than when you watch the movie.  Tolkien was trying to redefine the world.

Audience:  Sometimes you have chewy toffee and it starts destroying your dental work and pulling put your fillings.  Is there ever a point where something is too chewy?

Bear: "Too chewy" is dependent on the reader.  Some will find Dan Brown too chewy, and some will find Gene Wolfe not chewy enough.

[Subject turns to first contact stories and Patrick O'Brian]

Brust: The whole point of an Other is in order to examine what isn’t the Other.  You can’t have that bit where Maturin and his friend are complaining about the British because they are so damned emotional, unless you have something to compare it to.  In order to examine ourselves as a species we need to compare it to alien species. 

[Audience member talks about an old tradition or story featuring Persians comparing about the French.]

Lenny Bailes: Gene Wolfe exploits your tendency to read to exclusion.  Someone in a toga may be an alien.

TNH:  Gene Wolfe writes books where the basic unit of construction is the trap door.

Lenny: Is the description of time travel in The Time Machine a chewy bit?  

Pamela:  If you really do it right, these things will do double duty.  So the necessary exposition really ties into your narrative and will do double duty.

Frenkel:  I don’t think that’s really a chewy bit.  That opening of the time machine–it’s not subtle.  You’re not getting fooled by anything.  The essence of chewy bits means you’re not aware of them.

TNH: Not all subtext explodes on the same people.

Harriet: Tolkien is the ultimate sourdough bread starter of chewy bits for fantasy.  If authors are under contract, does it have a chance to develop and grow?

TNH:  In some cases you can look at a book, music, etc. and say, "this needs to simmer longer."

Bull:  You once said that about the Santa Monica mountains.

TNH:  The stones were half baked. I broke one in half!

Audience [Klages?]: The reason that writers use fairies or fairyland is to be able to throw in a chewy bit unexpectedly...which is why we have brownies!

[a few boos]

TNH:  That actually works.

Audience:  Are reading and writing two different activities, or are they points on a spectrum?  People are writing dissertations about books, etc, so reading is not just a passive activity.

TNH:  "They are two different activities." [full stop]

Audience:  A book is a conversation.  It's a conversation with itself, the author is having a conversation with you, the book is having a conversation with other books etc. This idea of chewy bits is about where the author is opening up the floor and allowing conversation to happen intertextually.

Frenkel: Yes.

Bull:  Sometimes it’s the writer having a conversation with their own assumptions, or previous books.  Sometimes it’s me talking to me, and never makes it to the reader level.

Brust:  Reading and writing won’t be separate in a few years.

[Here's where I have my hand up, so my notes are crap for a bit. Sorry!]

[Someone]: You want to discover it as you go.

Frenkel (? or Audience?):  You can’t be someone’s mother in a book and tell them what they need to know.

[Someone]:  The older you get the more you know

Bull:  [Talking about Yeats]

TNH: The point where it all snaps together, there really is this amazing rush.

[Then I get called on and say my bit, which is that if you write a dissertation about a book, that's writing, not reading, so they are, in fact, separate activities, and that writing something in response to something you've read is not a new thing.  Yay, woo! A few more exchanges don't get properly noted here because I'm all flustered.]

[Assorted folks]:  Fiction is a conversation between the reader and the author – chewy bits – different levels of reading – getting more out of it than the author puts in to it – we don’t all have the same loam – we may have the penumbra.

Brust:  The readers will put more than you put in.

Bull:  The reason why writers perfect craft is to maximize the amount of what they’re saying that the reader gets.

Brust:  My drum teacher once said that chops are what let you say what you want to say--not having it gets in the way of saying what you want.

Bull: A story has to stand on its own without allusions.  You’re putting them in for the reader who gets it.

Bear:  “And you’re never going to get all of them because you’re not in the writer’s brain.”

Brust:  “Thank Christ!”