Birds who've flown the old coop

 It's hard to pick this week again, as there's been a lot of good stuff, but I've harped on about AI and Peter Thiel a fair bit so how about a throwback series? Sarah Marshall has been killing it on The Devil You Know (among CBC's last gasps before complete enshittification), which is a really cool take on the Satanic Panic. It's a story I know quite well, having, well, been around back then, and also read and watched a lot about it after the fact. Her approach is different, though; she interviews people who were not main characters in the drama but were nonetheless affected.

My favourite episode so far has been the second episode, "Marylyn Remembers." I knew the story of Michelle Remembers, the book responsible for the idea that Satanic ritual abuse victims were repressing their memories, and of the relationship between Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder, who grossly abused his professional responsibilities and ultimately married her. What I didn't know was anything about his wife at the time, Marylyn, who Sarah tracks down for her take on the story. She's clear-eyed and insightful after all these years about her experiences, and despite the true crime label on the show, Sarah's interview is warm and compassionate, telling a very human story of betrayal amidst an imaginary epic battle of good vs. evil.

It's funny to think of this as a history podcast (again, since I was around for it!) but of course there are modern parallels, and Sarah is not subtle about drawing them.

Just finished: To Leave a Warrior Behind: The Life and Stories of Charles R. Saunders, the Man Who Rewrote Fantasy by Jon Tattrie. This was so good. Saunders was a fascinating person both on and off the page, but also the biography is really well written and a page-turner. I don't have a lot to add beyond that you'll like it if you're at all interested in genre fiction, Black social movements, and/or the history of Black communities in Halifax. Or just interesting people in general.


The second is that a lot of the advice amounts to "write better," with no real suggestions for that. Like, he quotes part of a Churchill speech to talk about inspiring leaders, and one of the exercises is "give your character an inspiring speech." How. Tell me how. Or at least analyze the Churchill speech to talk about what's working in it. 

The problem with talking about emotion in writing is that this is built often through a prolonged time with the characters, so if you quote excerpts from books no one has read (there are a few classics in there, but a lot of the examples are from books I'd never read, like Christian fiction), you need context. This is something Klein does very well in her book—she talks about the well-known ones that we'd all have encountered, like the awful wizard books and The Fault In Our Stars and the Hunger Games, but her most detailed analysis is a book she edited called Marcelo In the Real World. Assuming no one has read it (I'd never heard of it), she not only analyzes lengthy passages, but sets up the entire context of the story so we can see why those passages work. Whereas Maass quotes a paragraph and assumes we'll get the emotion, whereas my reaction is, "who are these people and why should I care?"

But most of all, it's very shallow for a book about, well, feelings. He warns away from sending your characters to overly dark places or making them overly dark people, and the autobiographical sketches suggest an upper-middle class, cishet, white, cozy life. Readers want to feel connected and inspired by your characters, so they should be positive and inspirational.

I'm sorry what.

I was hoping, in a book like this, to get a sense of how to better twist the knife. His breakdown of The Fault Of Our Stars amounts to "we feel sad because of how these kids lived, not how they die." Really? Is that all you take from it, emotionally speaking?

One passage really stands out to me, and that's an incident where he describes trying to pay for tickets for a game that his young son really wants to see, only he's lost his wallet on the subway. His wife is with him but doesn't have her wallet. He is faced with a moment of panic at the prospect of disappointing his son.

Okay, that's pretty good! I like the idea of investing relatively low-stakes moments with emotion. Only...he goes on to talk about something else, and then adds "by the way my wife had her wallet after all so she paid and I regained my cool and we all saw the game." Which, I'm sure is what happened, but why tell the story if that's the ending?

If I were writing it, off the top of my head, why not have the parents argue, the wife codependent on her husband, the husband irresponsible to leave his wallet on the subway. It could get public, ugly, and explosive. And then the child starts crying, more upset at the prospect of his parents fighting than missing the game. In an upbeat story, they realize that their son is the most important thing and stop fighting in order to comfort him. Or in a more adult story, they make up, coldly, but the resentment continues to fester, and the absent wallets become a metaphor for patriarchal control. Anything other than "oh it all turned out to be fine."

So yeah this book didn't do it for me.

Currently reading: The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. The library gods sent me a chaser after that last one. It's about two generations of women; Minerva, in 1998, lives on a rather beautiful and extremely haunted campus, researching a forgotten author who was a contemporary of Lovecraft. In 1908, her great-grandmother, Alba, lives on a farm and years for the elegant, sophisticated life that her uncle leads in the city. I've just hit the point where Minerva runs into the wealthy son of a university donor who knew the author and has been invited to brunch with the family, and Alba's uncle has come to live with them (and maybe convince her brother to sell the family farm). Anyway, it's SMG, obviously I'm into it.

 This has been a great week for podcasts, which I'm sure will spill into next week as I'm still catching up. And in particular I'm on a pre-modern history kick. So what's more fun than adding dragons to that? Wizards & Spaceships' "How To Write a Kickass Fantasy Battle ft. Suzannah Rowntree" looks at the myths and truths behind medieval warfare and how you can apply those to fantasy writing. Inspired by the research she had to do for her own novels, which are historical fantasy, and Russia's war on Ukraine, Suzannah wrote an accessible guide to writing battles for those of us who will probably never set foot in a war zone. She talks about who gets it right, who gets it wrong, and why you shouldn't leave your comfy castle during a siege.