Descriptions Describe the Describer · 4:49pm Sep 21st, 2022
I was listening to Artificial Condition, the second book in Martha Well's Murderbot Diaries, and wondering why I enjoyed it so much. (The first book is All Systems Red. That link is to the Audible version, which is just $4 (70% off) for the next 2 days, as part of Audible's yearly 3-day sale on everything [1].)
There are lots of obvious reasons to love Murderbot, but I feel like, in addition to loving Murderbot, I'm enjoying the books stylistically. That seems hard to explain, since they're all unembellished first-person narration. But I got a clue from the first paragraphs:
SECUNITS DON’T CARE ABOUT the news. Even after I hacked my governor module and got access to the feeds, I never paid much attention to it. Partly because downloading the entertainment media was less likely to trigger any alarms that might be set up on satellite and station networks; political and economic news was carried on different levels, closer to the protected data exchanges. But mostly because the news was boring and I didn’t care what humans were doing to each other as long as I didn’t have to a) stop it or b) clean up after it.
But as I crossed the transit ring’s mall, a recent newsburst from Station was in the air, bouncing from one public feed to another. I skimmed it but most of my attention was on getting through the crowd while pretending to be an ordinary augmented human, and not a terrifying murderbot. This involved not panicking when anybody accidentally made eye contact with me.
Fortunately, the humans and augmented humans were too busy trying to get wherever they were going or searching the feed for directions and transport schedules. Three passenger transports had come through wormholes along with the bot-driven cargo transport I had hitched a ride on, and the big mall between the different embarkation zones was crowded. Besides the humans, there were bots of all different shapes and sizes, drones buzzing along above the crowd, and cargo moving on the overhead walkways. The security drones wouldn’t be scanning for SecUnits unless they were specifically instructed, and nothing had tried to ping me so far, which was a relief.
I was off the company’s inventory, but this was still the Corporation Rim, and I was still property.
It didn't hit me until the last sentence that I'd just been given an infodump [2], of the best kind—the kind you absorb eagerly, without realizing it's an infodump.
Why didn't I realize I was getting an infodump? I think it's because Secunit describes only those things relevant to its personal problem. That problem is being a robot [3] that's legally someone's property, which humans would be terrified of if they knew what it was, trying to get through a crowded transportation hub without being recognized by an extensive security network of cameras, drones, and remote servers. We read what is actually an info-dump not because we want that info, but because we're anxious for Secunit's safety.
What's more, the way Secunit describes things, describes Secunit. Lines like "the news was boring and I didn’t care what humans were doing to each other as long as I didn’t have to a) stop it or b) clean up after it" have a distinct voice, as does Secunit calling itself "a terrifying murderbot". A subtler clue is that Secunit notices distinctions between different kind of bots, like what they look like and what they do, but doesn't notice any differences between humans beyond "human" and "augmented [botlike] human". The humans are just "trying to get wherever they were going"; Secunit "didn’t care what humans were doing to each other".
So focusing on information relevant to Secunit's current problem both keeps us interested, and makes the infodump serve three purposes: describing the world, moving the plot forward, and describing Secunit's personality.
If I go back to the examples of Raymond Chandler's good descriptions that I gave in How Aragon Describes People, I see some of the same things.
The third man dropped the grin off his face and looked as if he had never grinned in his life. He was a tall bird in a gray suit and he didn’t want any nonsense.
That description isn't just concise; it's judgemental. "He was tall and lean and had little patience with fools" would have meant about the same thing, objectively, but wouldn't tell us that Marlowe already doesn't like this guy. Marlowe doesn't like bosses. That's probably why he's a private eye.
He took his time about it. It didn’t matter about my time.
Marlowe doesn't like bosses who think they're more important than him.
She bit her lip and turned her head a little and looked at me along her eyes. Then she lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theater curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.
Marlowe doesn't like people who try to control him.
Add up all these descriptions of other people, and I think Marlowe has a problem with authority figures.
(I don't see this happening in Aragon's descriptions, which I still think are excellent. Aragon wasn't trying to describe himself, so it's appropriate that his descriptions don't describe him.)
[1] Instead of getting an Audible membership to get cheap credits, you can save even more money by stocking up for the year during their fall sale. I just bought 50 audiobooks. I told myself I could pay for them all by fasting one day every week for that year, which I meant to do anyway. I've been fasting for almost 3 hours now, and am already obsessing over food. :P
[2] We learned that
- The speaker is a secunit, whatever that is.
- It doesn't care about the news.
- It hacked its governor module just in order to watch TV shows.
- It exists in a world dominated by broadcast (not Web-like, but one-directional) media, and that world is so intent on controlling information that that media is protected by layers of infosec, and who watches what is monitored.
- The speaker doesn't care much about humans.
- The speaker is in a mall, apparently in a large open space, on a "transit ring", and is a kind of bot, not a human; there are "augmented humans" who resemble bots.
- The speaker fears social interaction with humans.
- The humans around it are all travellers; the transit ring is a transport hub (something like Grand Central Station).
- This is a hub for space travel, using wormholes, including both passenger and cargo transports. Cargo transports may be driven by bots.
- There are many drones in the air, including security drones.
- The speaker was formerly owned by "the company", and is in a part of space where it's considered property.
[3] It isn't really a robot. It's a cyborg. The "robots are people too" theme of the Murderbot Diaries is marred by the fact that robots aren't people in these books; only people with organic brains can be people.
It's all very quantum. Observing affects the observer at least as much as the observed. I hadn't really thought about this before, it's definitely a good way to inform the reader about the character of the narrator.
These are certainly good (or even great) examples of how first person narration can show us things about the character who's doing the narration.
Which imho can be SO MUCH FUN.
This is a very good distillation of the technique. I wish that the English teachers I suffered under had understood (and could communicate) elements of the craft at this sort of clear, nut-and-bolts level.
BTW, I love the Murderbot series for many other reasons, one of which is that the supposedly emotionless/robotic titular character has a more admirable (and realistic) moral code than most of the people around it. Kind of refreshing in a literary ecosystem heavily populated by protagonists who are essentially serial killers exculpated by having a dead girlfriend or somesuch.
5687767
Oh, I love unreliable narrators! Particularly ones that unwittingly tell you so much about themselves that they're trying to hide or deny. (See Murderbot series mentioned above.)
5687789
I think the problem is that most of the people writing popular fiction are doing so based on the instruction of the completely incompetent education system you mentioned.
5687801
I completely agree. There are certain over-simplistic "rules" of writing that have been elevated to the status of unthinking dogma by academics, which produce painfully bad writing with depressing regularity.
"Drama is conflict," is one that springs immediately to mind. I don't know how many irritating scenes of pointless bickering (i.e., "conflict") I've suffered through, but none of them were dramatic (or interesting) in the least.
I think that various writing conferences are of more use to would-be writers than nearly all academic courses. Hell, I think people would be better off reading this blog regularly!
I feel like sometimes descriptions reveal stuff about the author, too . . . just from reading the title of the blog, before I had a chance to read through it, I started thinking about what things I describe in stories and what things I don't, and what that reveals about me as an author (for good or ill).
As 5687767 said, there's a lot that can be revealed about a character based on what they say or how they say it. Sometimes that's a problem for an author; for example there were cases in Silver Glow's Journal where I needed to figure out how to put in plot points that she might not care about or be interested in but which were important for later. Other things were more on the surface--while she got along well enough with the unicorns she knew, she was very much a tribalist.
5687801
Lucky for me, I guess, that I never took any creative writing classes, so I never had anybody tell me how I'm supposed to do it, I just figured it out on my own by reading a lot and using what I liked in my own writing, while not doing what I didn't like.
5687811
I took only two creative writing courses in college. I spent the second one arguing with the professor, whose main dogma was that it didn't matter what you said or what happened in the story, only that you told it with a unique style. I knew near zero about writing fiction then, but the instructor knew less than zero--what he believed was literally negative information [1]. Literary fiction was already in a death spiral.
What happened to literature in the late 20th century was a phenomenon not unique to literature. Something a little like a financial bubble where people keep investing even when they know the price is too high. But this is a bubble with a strategic purpose--to enable the majority of less-skilled people to form a coalition to expel the skilled people and gain their positions.
The general strategy is for an initially small group to insist on things that are so destructive or stupid that most people recognize the demands as phony. The purpose isn't to accomplish the crazy things; the purpose is to signal to everyone "join us and we'll throw out the people on top and take their stuff."
I think this is why most literary critics before 1930 were writers themselves, and almost no literary critics after 1960 were writers. The people who didn't know how to write realized they had no chance of becoming famous literary critics unless they threw out people who knew how to write, and made literary criticism not depend on understanding literature. Notice that literary critics today, who are supposed to understand literature, are some of the worst writers on Earth. Their prose is so twisted, it must be deliberate.
I ought to write a blog post about BR Myers' book A Reader's Manifesto.
Come, now. Surely things can't be that bad!
[1] Negative information is information which, if believed, causes the believer to perform worse at the task the information is to be used for.
5687831
Welcome to the Monkey House, right? This seems to be particularly true in Hollywood nowadays.
The book sounds interesting, I hope you do blog about it!
5687831
Sounds good to me. If I did more blogging about writing, I might do that myself...but I guess I don't.
EDIT: If people want to see a shorter, non-book version of Myers' "A Reader's Manifesto" on the internet, there's https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-readers-manifesto/302270/
Martha Wells has a blog on Dreamwidth, here: https://marthawells.dreamwidth.org/ As with any blog on Dreamwidth, you can make a RSS feed of it. Dreamwidth is an ethical platform for blogs, ad free, free to join, free to create your own blog or community there, Dreamwidth's business model runs on selling paid subscriptions which come with small perks.
5687885
Interesting, but odd that she has so few readers there. Also the layout looks too much like Livejournal. I don't know why that bothers me, but it does. What does Dreamwidth think that "ethical" means?
I see from the link she posted to the Hugo winners that women, who submit about 1/4 of science fiction & fantasy manuscripts, won 10 out of the 10 literary awards. The odds of that happening in a fair competition are literally 1 in a million. (1 in 1048576, to be precise.)
5687890
Dreamwidth was designed to be LiveJournal but not run by Russians, so the resemblance is deliberate. In this context, ethical means "not Russian."
IMHO, artistic awards are not and never were a fair competition, they are
meritbadges of two types: We Love You and You Make Us Look Good. Sometimes there are begrudged People are Beginning to Notice that We're Ignoring You, So— handouts, but those are relatively rare. Adherence to dominant social dogma, an entertaining personality, and an influential circle of friends is what garners awards, not artistic merit.Yep. That's three of the four pillars of narration: story, theme, character, and atmosphere. Every single word or string of words should always be forwarding at least one of those four things, bonus points if it's more than one simultaneously, which your quoted examples do exceptionally well.
What strikes me here:
Is that what you're talking about so clearly here and what your writing instructor so failed to talk about clearly are the same thing: narrative voice. Agents and editors are always going on and on about how they're looking for "voice," but none of them seems able to explain what they mean by that. It seems to be one of those "I know it when I see it" things...
It's easier to see in 1st-person stories, but the same principle holds true in 3rd-person, too, I'm convinced. If you're writing a story about Applejack doing things, for instance, you'd use different words, different sentence structure, a whole different "voice" than if you were writing a story about Rarity doing things. Because the characters are so different and have such differing experiences of the world, even if they're not the 1st-person narrator, the narrative itself would change to reflect who these characters are.
It goes back to what you were saying about Salman Rushdie, too, I think. He has a very distinct narrative voice, so the "literary crowd" likes him even though he insists on actually telling stories.... :)
Mike
5687890
I don't recall the Dreamwidth owners describing their LiveJournal fork as having an ethical business model. I saw that some other venue, might have been Mastodon, was said to have an ethical business model since it did not rely on farming users for consumer behaviour or on selling adspace for revenue. As Dreamwidth matches that ad-free, tracker-free type business model, I figure that "ethical" is a concise way of saying Dreamwidth is 'not evil'.
I don't pay much heed to the Hugo awards, there aren't any pony fiction novels in the running.
I'm not going to quibble with your math, my Stats for 
(OK, it's like rolling a four sided die and getting "1" 10 times in a row. Four sides on the die, 1 chance in four of getting a "1". 1/4. Roll ten times in a row, ten "1"'s in a row, multiply the 1/4 values and get 1 chance in 4 exponent 10. Ergo, 1 in a million. That doesn't help me at all in calculating the odds that, for instance, 3 of the winners had been women. Hmmm, unless it's 1/4 x 1/4 x 1/4 x 3/4 x 3/4 x 3/4 x 3/4 x 3/4 x 3/4 x 3/4. One in four hundred and seventy nine. That does not look right. Like I said, I do not grok stats.)
DummiesScience Undergrads course was like 40 years ago and it was all rote formula stuff anyway, not real comprehension.5687902
In fact, Dreamwidth is a LiveJournal "fork", built on opensource LiveJournal code by ex-LiveJournal staff, who I think have an affinity for fandom blogs. This might have predated SUP buying LiveJournal from that other company, "Five Alive" or something... oh, Five Apart. Five Apart just wanted to head hunt for LJ programmer talent, grab content and IP and dump what was left. So I don't think Russian ownership of LJ was ever really an issue for the Dreamwidth team. They had other issues which sucked out the fun of working for Livejournal.
5688128
Ah, I did not know that, thanks for the info!
5688129
You're welcome. ^_^ I also have a LiveJournal account, which I have not logged into since SUP implemented their Terms of Service update in 2017.
5688128
I looked at the Wikipedia entry on Livejournal, and what happened is that it was bought by a Russian company, and then later the Russian government forced it to begin enforcing Russian laws on its users' content, so that now you can probably get banned for, say, writing something negative about Putin, or positive about Ukranian "Nazis".
5688137
Me, too!
5688142
Yes, that's the most recent chapter in the LiveJournal saga, although I don't know how true the part about enforcing Russian laws on content is or how strictly. I started moving to Dreamwidth in May 2009 and as I said to iisaw, I stopped logging in to LiveJournal in 2017. As such, I haven't had to deal with potential censorship.